


Marriage And Monsters - An Eschatological Romance

by Sarsapariller



Category: Original Work
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy, Isekai, LitRPG, MarriageAndMonsters, Rationalist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 51
Words: 258,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarsapariller/pseuds/Sarsapariller
Summary: A healthy marriage is an ongoing conversation. So what happens when one partner is speaking English and the other is speaking the Celestial Language of Creation? Also the world seems to be ending, so maybe that should be a priority. Civilization is collapsing, magic and horror are rising, and suddenly all those lazy day conversations about heroism and fantasy are becoming very, very real. Can Sean and Haley's oddball partnership save the day? Can it even survive?Updates Tuesdays/Thursdays, will always be posted to/r/rationalwhen a new chapter goes up.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> E 5/23: First draft of the cover is up, thank you https://www.instagram.com/rhl_shen/! Final draft coming soon.  
> https://imgur.com/a/cYyjCBC
> 
> E 6/10: Final draft! https://i.imgur.com/tyc9Z1O.jpg

_The first time I_ really _met Haley was the second time I saw her. The first had been a movie night arranged by mutual friends. We sat next to each other in the dark of the theater, but I got barely more than an impression of perfume and an occasional elbow in my forearm. In the lobby afterwards she was awfully cute, but so quiet I thought I’d offended her somehow. When she texted me several days later about getting a coffee, it took me completely by surprise._

_We agreed on a coffee shop midway between us, and a time, and then I misjudged the drive and got there much earlier than I should have. It was a lucky move. When she came in I already had a drink, and I had a chance to observe quietly while she scanned the room for our table. It’s true that we’re never more ourselves than when we think nobody is watching. In that moment, meeting a virtual stranger in a coffee shop, she was confident, and calm, and completely in control of herself. She wasn’t any more than five feet tall but she had a piercing look in her eye that said the world was going to come to heel when she called it. She had long black hair, and a full length black skirt to match, with a white jacket thrown over her shoulders to keep off the unseasonable chill. I noticed with some alarm that she was carrying a clipboard- had I been looking at the wrong person all this time? But then she saw me smiling at her and beelined for the table._

_Pulling up a seat, she sat down and took a long look at me, assessing, not indifferent but not warm. I coughed, feeling a little bit exposed, and reached out a hand. “Hi! I’m Sean, nice to meet you again, uh, if you don’t mind me asking- what’s with the clipboard?”_

  _She jumped like she’d been shocked and blushed a little. Had she- did she forget that I was capable of speech? “Oh, uh, hello! Yes. Trevor’s told me about you. I’m Haley, niceties, etcetera-” She actually pronounced etcetera rather than ramble on, I found that oddly charming- “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions before we begin? To, you know, establish compatibility.” She waggled the clipboard with one hand, indicating, I supposed, that this was where my… compatibility… was to be assessed._

  _“Uh. I mean. Yes, of course, and now I feel a little silly that I don’t have a list of questions for you, but isn’t that kind of thing that one usually establishes through first date conversation? I don’t feel like I’m at my best when doing a performance evaluation, you know?”_

  _She considered that-_ _really_ _considered it, in that way a person has when you can see them retreating inward mentally for a moment. “Noted. I promise not to rely on any biases established in the initial interview except those related to the values you express a preference for. I know it’s a bit odd, but it seems much better to get the big answers in advance rather than discover later on that there’s some mutual incompatibility after we’ve grown… attached, I guess.”_

Damn girl, who hurt you? _Was what I thought, but what I said was “Well that seems wise, and I’m a big fan of preparedness. So, what’ve you got for me. Kids? Career path?”_

_She held her clipboard up and produced a pen from out of nowhere, peering at me over the top. “Question 1: What is your core utility function?”_

Uh. _“Come again?”_

_“Consider a set of choices facing you, to which you may assign preference. Absent the need for food, shelter, companionship and so on, what metric would you use to assign a preference ordering?”_

_Okay, this was_ not _where I thought my conversation was going to go this evening. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to seem slow but- you’re asking about, like, career goals here?”_

 " _It’s fine, I told you I’m not going to factor the establishing conversation into my evaluation, just the answers. Not your career goals- unless those are to satisfy a higher need than an income stream. If you had_ every _need in your life met, what would you do with yourself?” She continued to stare at me over the clipboard, as if this was the world’s most natural topic for a first date over coffee. I supposed that for her it might be- my assessment of her intellect was rapidly climbing, with a number of question marks appearing next to ‘Social skills,’ and somewhere in the back of my mind a thread was spun off just to kick myself for the extremely misogynist assumption that I was going to be the one leading this dance. But I liked it. I wanted to see where she was going with this._

 " _It seems like the kind of question that people should have an answer for,” I said, “But I guess it’s been so long since I even_ considered _the possibility of having every need met that I’ve lost sight of what my answer would be. I guess… I’d like to explore, and create art, and teach others about the things I’d seen. I’d go find the secret fire and bring it back to humanity.” Suitably profound, I thought. “Can I ask_ _you_ _the same question?”_

  _She nodded smartly. “It’s only fair. I would like to save the world.”_

  _In spite of myself I barked out a laugh, and then immediately felt terrible for it as she glared at me. “I’m sorry, that just took me by surprise. That’s an intensely noble goal, but… save it from what?”_

 " _From everything. From itself. Climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid strike- my preference would be- is- to find a way to shield the human race from these things and any others that might threaten them. The physical Earth itself is a secondary goal. I mean the only way to make humanity truly immune to extinction events is probably to spread it to the stars.”_

  _I shook my head. “But how would you even go about doing it? You’re talking about having resources to meet your needs, not a genie on hand.”_

  _She nodded again. “Of course, but a utility function isn’t a wish. It is the metric you use to evaluate your choices. If life is a series of options, my function is a knife I can use to pare down to those that bring me closer to my goal- even if only infinitesimally- and those that don’t.”_

  _“Okay, but… how could you_ _know_ _what was going to bring you closer? If you had to choose between a path where you learned nuclear physics and a path where you became a fabulously wealthy financial analyst, which would you pick? If I were going to apply mine, I’d pick the physics because it better suits my need for exploration and, in this scenario, my financial needs are already met. But for you, one might be a step on the path to discovering cold fusion or something, but the other would allow you to influence policy on a global scale. Without any knowledge of the future, how does your utility function help you?”_

  _She smiled, and I realized it was the first smile she’d given me since our conversation began. She was truly enjoying this, I decided- which was good because I was too. “It’s a matter of probability. With a bit of math it should be easy to figure out what the odds are of me making a world-changing discovery in physics, versus the odds of me meaningfully altering global policy toward my preferences just through political donation. Assuming those were the only two options, of course. But, to put myself on the spot- if given a choice between knowledge and power, which is really what you’re offering here, I would choose power every time. Knowledge can be wielded by the powerful, but seldom grants power itself. You would choose knowledge, of course, which is a perfectly legitimate answer and seems like it speaks well to our compatibility.”_

  _Did it? Well, it was nice that she thought so. “It’s nice that you think so?” I said. I was feeling like a real grade-A brain genius at this point. “So it kind of sounds like you feel there are only two real utility functions in the end and the rest is just moralizing. Knowledge, or Power? The ability to shape the world or the wisdom to know what to do with it?”_

  _She bobbed her head to the left, accepting the point but not conceding it. “Perhaps it is more accurate to say that taking the first derivative of the utility function will result in one of the two. There can be many goals, but only so many means to shape our existence toward those ends. What matters though is, ultimately, not the means but the end.”_

  _“I feel like you’ve just opened up an entire second front on this battlefield, but maybe I won’t sally forth into that breach just yet. Listen, I know we saw a movie last time, but there’s a theater just across the way and I was thinking of going to see that disaster movie, 2012, after we got done here. You want to come with?”_

  _She smiled again, warming to her subject. “Yes, provided we discover mutual compatibility here I’d enjoy seeing the end of the world with you. Now- Question 2. What, in your opinion, are the universal human rights?”_

  _That was the night I met my wife-to-be._

 ***

10 years later

***

I stood at the back door to our house, staring out into the evening gloom. “Honey! The goddamn cat’s run outside again!” _Fat little bastard’s going to make a hefty takeout meal for some cougar one of these days, I swear to-_

"Go get him please, I’m grading papers!” came the call from upstairs. I really did love the acoustics of the split-level we called home. The entire back half of the house was one enormous vertical space, with the stairs from our second floor ascending up across the first-floor kitchen and into Haley’s office, the only room on the third. She worked from home as an adjunct professor- _who’s after knowledge_ now, _huh? -_ remotely for a college in New England. I _knew_ she was grading papers, but…

“ _But it’s your damn cat,”_ I grumbled under my breath as I stomped outside. Technically the ownership was mutual, but he had made it very clear who really held the exclusive rights to tummy rubs and bedtime cuddles just as soon as we moved in together. Two years of cohabitation plus seven years of marriage hadn’t changed that- if anything it had only made him fatter and surlier. Every night now I had to share the head space of my bed with the ass side of 30 pounds of hot fur. I contemplated just letting him stay out there with my compliments to the cougars.

The rain was _really_ coming down. It was a properly biblical thunderstorm, of the kind that seemed increasingly common lately, and was probably quite literally the product of all our carbon sins. The shared yard space of our little suburban neighborhood had become a bit of a debris field of downed branches and flooded depressions. The cat was huddled directly under the porch stairs, thankfully for me, and scooping him up was no trouble. I patted the sodden lump as I walked back to the door. “Storm’s got you all bothered, huh? You’re in a real catch-22, if we all died tomorrow the weather might get better eventually, but then who’d put food in your bowl? Sorry guy, you’ve got no choice- ride or die.”

And then the world ended.

It felt like lightning struck _inches_ behind me. A flash of heat and the world turned white, and a sound so big it stopped being noise and just became _pressure_ engulfed me. Blinded, I flew forward, but the wall that should have been in front of me did not stop my momentum. A feeling like wind, that _wasn’t_ wind, that came from the _wrong angle_ rushed by me, propelling me forward and I assumed in that moment that I must have died. A gas main, or a real honest to god lightning strike, or _something_ and now my spirit was detached from my body, floating to my final destination- _without Haley? No. No, no-_ I turned, in that un-space, and fought the un-wind, to get back to my body and my life.

I don’t know how long that struggle lasted. I didn’t seem to tire, but I had no frame of reference for motion or the passage time in the infinite white expanse. But if it was my will against the universe, and the stakes were my soul and my partner, I was not about to lose. The resistance did not lessen, but eventually on the horizon I saw a… gate? A portal? A glowing presence, in the midst of the glowing white _absence_ , at any rate. It grew closer, or larger, it was impossible to tell. Eventually it crossed some threshold and-

 ---

I looked up from the meal I was preparing, the first in three days of hard riding. It might have been old weather patterns collected from a barogrove I’d passed on the trail, but damn it I was hungry and I didn’t welcome the interruption. Down the ridge line, out across the valley, there was movement in the feeler grass. The vessel I was wearing had deft hands but poor eyesight- some lax breeding there, not fit for a lawman- and I didn’t want to swap to my scout when the work was half finished. I moved to the coterie and fished around in the back until I found the old spyglass, then put it up to one of the better eyes on the old carcass.

It was definitely my quarry. Three days ago they’d rustled the vessel that Aimer was wearing along with a passel of others, and I’d been tracking them ever since by the trail he was leaving for me- broken branches, tracks in the shape of an arrow. I was pretty sure they didn’t know he was in among the herd, but yesterday the signs cut off. Since then I’d been following by trail sign and dead reckoning, not stopping for sleep or to rest the vessels, scouting from above as often as I could while my hauler pulled the coterie along the trail I left. He didn’t move as fast as I’d have liked, what passed for a brain in the old nag wasn’t much good at handling elevation changes and I ended up wearing him too often to get good scouting.

Meanwhile the men I’d tracked were moving as if the devil himself were after them, which wasn’t strictly true- I was only his doorman, at best.

On the horizon it looked like they had a more permanent camp. Out here on the trail I might be able to take three rustlers, but a dozen or more, in a fortified position? If Aimer wasn’t dead yet he’d be done for certain if they made it to that town and began taking stock of the herd. I had one chance to get him out, as soon as night fell. For now I returned to the food. Needed to make something for the rest of the vessels in the carriage space of the old coterie- they were going to have to burn some real energy soon.

***

A storm was rolling over the horizon by the time night fell. I used the afternoon to get in position- wearing my scout, having it ride on my hauler so I could maintain a tenuous connection and issue orders to what passed for a mind when I wasn’t directly in control of the old nag. I parked the coterie up behind a hill overlooking the camp, and did some careful reconnaissance through the scout’s keen eyes. 15 men, too many to take, puttered around behind the fortifications as I watched. Two were on sentry duty, wearing big hulking sentinels, and the rest were eating, making camp, or trying on their new acquisitions. I saw Aimer, thankfully still alive- but tied up, in the center of camp. Bait? A hostage? Either way they weren’t going to get what they were looking for.

Under cover of rain and darkness I landed my scout on every vessel I’d brought with me, and steered each one through the outlying feeler grass and into position. As I departed each I left one command behind- on my signal, run straight toward that camp. I left my best rifle in the grip of the hauler, only carrying a six shot pistol with me.

Thunder crashed and the wind picked up as I returned to the main gate. With two quick shots I disabled the men at the gate, the cracks reverberating through the night and alerting all of my vessels. Practically as one, all half-dozen of them took off and blew through the opening, reverting to a more panicked baseline as they cleared the entrance. The men inside, assuming attack by an entire posse, quickly responded with shouts and wild rifle fire out into the darkness, but that only served to spook their herd and add to the confusion.

Not wasting any time I beat the scout’s wings and flew in, staying low and ducking behind every obstruction available. There were a lot of beasts moving around in the chaos but it was very easy to tell a worn vessel, moving with purpose, from one just acting on instinct and I didn’t want to get spotted as I closed the distance to Aimer’s position. He was only half awake, startled out of his doze by the noise of my assault, barely resisting as I cut the ropes binding him to his post. I landed on one shoulder and spoke into his ear in the scout’s rasping birdlike voice. “Aimer! It’s me! Come away now, quick like, this distraction ent gonna last but a minute or two.”

He looked up, as far as the head of the quadrupedal shepherd he was wearing _could_ look, at any rate- “Sheriff? That you? Shit, I thought I was dead for sure. There’s a back entrance where they keep the wash basin, let’s get out through there.” As he spoke I could hear shouts- angry, startled now- as the rustlers discovered that all of the “Men” attacking their camp were just empty vessels. A crack sounded- gunfire, close overhead. Best we be off then.

The chase was furious but hindered by the thunderstorm and the near-total darkness of the night. Aimer’s low form kept him beneath the tops of the grass, and I simply skimmed it as fast as the scout could carry me. Even so, I felt a hot flash of pain that told me somebody’s bullet had found a home in my scout's torso. Without something else to swap to, that was going to become a serious issue long before we made it back to town.

What felt like hours of hard pursuit later, Aimer carried me slung over his shoulders into a small cavern, muttering all the while. “Damn fool thing, coming in like that, Sherriff. What you gotta do that for? They’da kept me a few more days, like as not. You coulda traded for me or just come back with a crew to make short work of em. Now you’re shot and I’m all abroad. Is there even enough headspace in here for two of us? Damn that storm’s getting rowdy, we’re gonna have to stay here for the night…” as he spoke and the tension of the chase drained away, my vision began to dim. I made peace with it- it _had_ been a damn fool thing, but I’d saved one of mine, and that was as good a send off as any self respecting lawman could hope for. I lay my head back and let the darkness claim me.

\---

I found myself in a space between worlds. Half of what I saw around me was my kitchen- complete with granite top island and track lighting- and the other half was a cave on a moonless, stormy night. The edges where the two realities overlapped were impossible to look at- I could not say where one world began and the other ended, only that they were never supposed to meet.

I was a computer programmer, 35 years old, standing in my home, soaked to the bone. I was a sherriff out of Angelica’s Ditch, 150 season cycles conscious, bleeding out my last vessel in the dark of a cave. I was both. I stared at myself, both of me suddenly awake and present, and nobody else. The cat and Aimer were both notable for their absence. Neither of me spoke, for a while- we knew each other completely, what need was there? Viewed from outside, the sherriff’s scout was an insectoid creature, like a dragonfly but larger than a mid-sized dog, streamlined and wiry, with beady blue eyes and a small tapered wedge of carapace where a mouth would be on any creature from _this_ Earth. Its forelimbs held wonderfully dextrous manipulators, almost like a monkey’s. It would have been terrifyingly alien if it weren’t simply _my vessel_ to my mind, in that moment.

Eventually I spoke. I don’t know which of me- surely the languages wouldn’t even line up- but I understood perfectly. “Well, I’m guessing _this_ wasn’t supposed to happen.” It wasn’t a vocalization to communicate; It was more like, a conscious action to cross whatever threshold this was before me. Us. I divorced us then, briefly, for the sake of the discussion. The me-that-was-Sean said “I, you, uh, look like you’re in trouble over there. I’m not sure I can… _come_ to you, but- you need anything?”

Me-that-was-Sherriff coughed weakly and chuckled. “Son, and I do recognize the humor in patronizing my own damn self with that title- I think the only thing I need right now is a holy man, and fast. No offense.” Sure enough, the room-that-was-my-cave seemed to be shrinking. _Crumbling,_ it felt as though that reality was fraying at the edges and the reality of the kitchen was recovering itself. It began to dominate our shared space, and I found myself able to walk toward… me. (Look, _you_ try to describe a scene when the first person singular refers to more than one being!)

Me-that-was-Sean held out a hand and said “I’m not about to let myself bleed out on the floor. There’s a hospital ten minutes from here- also, a vet- and whatever’s happening here, it doesn’t look like we’ve got much time. Come on.”

Me-that-was-Sherriff considered, and sighed. “I’d say we’re both gonna regret this, but there ain’t no ‘Both’ here, and I made a habit long ago a’not regretting my damn stupid ideas.” One manipulator reached out, and I took my own hand. I held on as the last edges of the cave reality collapsed in, and with a snap-

\---

I flew forward and hit the back door, _hard,_ soaked and nearly deafened in the aftermath of the explosion. It felt like all of reality was wavering around me, fragmenting, knitting itself back together, spinning out. The cat, incensed at his mistreatment, jumped out of my arms and pelted through the now-cracked-open door. I lay on the porch in a daze, staring up into the sky, blinking back the rain. It took a moment to piece together what felt so wrong about the scene- a bolt of lightning that close behind me should have devastated the tree, or the neighborhood power lines, or _something_ conductive- but there was no fire, no debris, no cracked glass- not even any power outages. I began to wonder if anything had happened at all, or if I’d had some kind of stroke, even as I picked myself up off the porch and continued inside.

“Haley?” I called up to the third floor in a shaky voice, trying to pull it together. If she hadn’t heard that catastrophe, I’d have to assume it was a brain thing. I heard the creak of her armchair and movement as she came to the door of her office. It sounded… _wrong_ somehow. That seems odd now, in hindsight, to fixate on such a thing after all that had just happened. But a decade living with my wife had us growing accustomed to each other in little ways- the sound of footfalls on wooden floorboards, the familiar groan of chair and couch and mattress as we moved about, living our lives in proximity to one another.

There were _two_ impacts as someone got out of the chair upstairs. Two distinct noises- first one _thump,_ then another. The creaking was _wrong_. Too heavy. Somehow in mere seconds all thought of my present circumstances left me, flushed away by sheer adrenaline, before I ever caught sight of the thing poking its head out of that door, and over the railing to peer at me below.

The face of a monster. It opened its mouth, and without moving lips or tongue _her voice came from it-_ “Sean, what’s wrong? I just came over all dizzy for a second and-”

< _Well, don’t that beat all. You sayin’ she don’t normally look like that? > _

Alright, something was _definitely_ wrong with my brain.


	2. Chapter 2

I’d like to say that my first reaction, upon waking up from a transdimensional journey to find that a monster had eaten my wife and stolen her voice, was suitably heroic. I think most people, immersed in fantasy scenarios as we can be through fiction and movies, picture themselves having some atypical reaction in these situations. In the moment though, I think I let out more of a dopplered scream as I ran across the first floor to the front door where we kept an old baseball bat. It was the only thing in the house that registered to my rebooting brain as a weapon.

I heard _it_ coming down the stairs behind me, calling out to me, and steadied myself around the corner, out of sight. It used her voice, again, as though it thought just the sound of her was going to throw me off- “Honey did something just happen, it felt like an earthquake- or maybe I got really dizzy- are you alright, what’s going on?” The words rolled off me as I hefted the bat in both hands. It came around the corner, _much_ faster and lower to the ground than I had anticipated, and I heroically screamed and flailed _hard_ with my improvised club.

It was much smaller than I’d have guessed from that initial glimpse- fear really does alter perception, I guess. it couldn’t have been more than 4 feet long, 2 high and maybe 60 pounds- and I missed the head entirely, bringing the bat down on the short spiny ridges of its back. It had four legs and _wings._ Why did it have _wings?_

Inexpert as I might be, my adrenaline fueled slug with a bat _should_ have stunned it, given the vast size difference. But it did nothing. Well, virtually nothing- “Ow! _Sean!_ Did you just hit me with a _bat?!?”_ The creature seemed shocked and a little offended, but entirely uninjured.

It was interesting, I thought in some detached part of mind, how much our socialization makes us vulnerable in moments like these. We just aren’t _equipped_ to do violence to someone we might know, without time to process and prepare. In that sense the creature’s voice emulation was terrifyingly effective. Even at the height of my fear, just hearing it call my name was enough to give me pause. But I wasn’t quite done yet- I hefted the bat back for another swing, which is when two things happened:

I cracked the head of the bat straight through the paper-thin door to our broom closet, and

The creature’s head darted forward like a streak of yellow lightning and snatched the whole damn thing right out of my hands.

The bat splintered apart in its jaws even as it glared at me. The _force_ that thing could exert- the _speed_ it could move- and it still hadn’t hurt me even after being attacked? “ _Jesus Christ_ Sean, what’s got _into_ you? Look what you did to the closet! You hit me with _a bat!”_

Something about that outraged, exasperated expression clicked with me. Now, of course, the whole thing is embarrassing to recall. I don’t even know why I thought she was monstrous. The small face glowering up at me was alien, to be sure, but no more so than any form I could recall Sherriff having worn, in our shared memories. Elongated like a dog’s, a golden-scaled snout that curved sharply down into a nearly beak-like overbite, with teeth projecting everywhere. Two high ridge lines over silver-white eyes, arcing back into golden fans where ears should have been, and the first hint of horns breaking the top of the brow. In hindsight it was almost cute, how _young_ that face looked. In the moment, as it somehow spoke in Haley’s voice, it was just disorienting. All I could call to mind was the movie _Annihilation,_ and that scene with the mutant bear that screamed like a person even as it tore the villain apart. “Sean-? “ But- but it hadn’t hurt me. It was _concerned_ about me. It was- it was.

“Uh” I said, very intelligently. “Haley?”

She sat back on all fours, looking extremely concerned. “Yeeessss, who did you think I was? What’s going on? Did you hit your head? Do you need a doctor?”

“Haley, you’re- you can’t have missed it. You’re a dragon.”

“Okay you _definitely need a doctor-”_

“Haley you’re _two_ feet tall and you have _six limbs!_ Did you not notice I’m standing four feet above you?!?”

“What- I- I’m on the ground because you _hit me with a bat!_ One of us is _definitely_ going nuts.”

“Look just- look at yourself. Maybe I _am_ hallucinating, but this is the second weirdest thing to happen tonight and I can’t believe the two are unrelated.”

She paused, for some extremely unfair reason suddenly wary about taking her eyes off the person who’d just tried to club her to death in her own home. She backed up a pace or two, then _turned her entire neck nearly 180 degrees_ and looked at her own torso, wings outstretched. She froze like that, for so long I was beginning to worry something had happened to her. I reached out- “Haley?” but before I could make contact she spoke.

“Huh.”

“That’s- that’s it?”

“Sean, it would appear that I am a dragon.”

It was something about the prim and proper, matter-of-fact tone of voice she used. I burst out laughing- lost all control, really- and slid backwards down the busted door of the broom closet until I was sitting at eye level with her. It took a long minute to get my composure back even as she snapped back to her glare. “Ohhh man, okay, needed that. Yes you do appear to be a dragon. How did you not _notice?”_

“I was busy! Grading papers! I get very… absorbed! It can’t have happened that long ago, you would have seen something or I would have noticed, these claws don’t exactly seem suited to operating a laptop.”

“Okay, fair enough. It’s probably connected to whatever just- as I came in- it felt like the whole world ended, and I went somewhere _else_. I met someone, and brought them back when their world started to collapse- I’m sounding crazy again aren’t I?”

She was certainly giving me the _look_ again. “Given the circumstances I think we can make some allowances. You went somewhere? Met someone? You were only outside for 2 minutes!”

“It was almost like a dream, of a whole other life. It wasn’t on earth. They’re here now, in my head- aren’t you Sherriff?” I cocked my head as if waiting for a response. The other consciousness took that as its cue:

“< _I suppose I am. Seems all three of us are in a tight spot. Howdy ma’am, pleased to meetcha. >” _

That was what _I_ heard it trying to say. But whatever organs Sherriff’s race had for communication, they were apparently quite different from ours. What came out of my mouth had more in common with a 2400 baud modem than human speech. Haley reared back and flared her wings in alarm. “Okay! Whatever that was, I didn’t understand a bit of it, but it sure wasn’t human! Are you sure it’s not hostile?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. I think Sherriff’s an infomorph? Its species seems to breed and keep livestock for use as interchangeable bodies, but I think the core being- the part that’s in my head- is just a consciousness. I can understand what it’s saying, but I guess it was a little foolish to assume anyone else was going to be able to. Sorry, Sherrif.” < _No harm done > _“As to hostility, I don’t think they’re any more malicious or organized than we are- so, no immediate danger? Also, Sherriff sounds like Sam Elliott in my head and I have a hard time attributing menace in that accent. But I’m not sure what happens when something that eats information rides around in your head for too long. Sherriff?”

_“ <Well normally you don’t want to sidesaddle with another person, cause the body won’t digest one consciousness but it don’t know what to do with two, so you’re always in danger of being et. But I don’t feel anything disappearing up here. From this head we share it looks like y’all don’t eat information? I reckon it may be safe up here. Little cramped though.>” _

I relayed this as Haley sat for a moment and considered. Eventually she spoke: “I notice I am _extremely_ confused. You say the world ended in a lightning strike, and then you met an alien, and his _reality_ collapsed, and now he’s in your brain? And I’m suddenly a fucking _dragon_ and it was so seamless it didn’t even interrupt me _grading papers?_ That’s two extremely improbable events, apparently at the same time, with seemingly no correlation between them.”

“Improbable, not impossible?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well _obviously not_ , given that they both just happened, but certainly not something _I’d_ have counted within the realm of probability just an hour ago!” She gestured toward the stairs- with a wing, I noticed with amusement- “Why us? Why now? Has this happened before? What is the link between these events? We need significantly more information and I find that I’m suddenly afflicted with the kind of claws that are going to make it a challenge not to punch a hole in my keyboard. Can you get my computer?”

“Of course” I said, standing up. She closed her eyes, trying to find some reservoir of inner calm that _I_ sure didn’t have. I hadn’t even made it up one flight before her eyes snapped open and she called out “ _SEAN!”_ which brought me about a sparrow’s-fart away from falling all the way back down. I regained my composure and turned around. “What _now?”_

_“I have a user interface.”_

\---

1 hour later

\---

“Okay, let’s summarize what we know” I said, reviewing the legal yellow pad. The power had gone out a half hour ago- not _terribly_ surprising, with the storm raging outside, but still kind of ominous. Luckily, with our newfound superpowers and half the internet loaded up in tabs on her laptop browser, we had _easily_ enough distractions to go an entire night without network connections. Maybe even _two._  “You did not _just_ get turned into any old dragon, you are literally a _gold dragon wyrmling_ from the _Pathfinder_ game system, complete with Feats, Stats, and Skills which you are able to manipulate. “

“These numbers seem to correspond in some way to real life. You can see enormously far in perfect grayscale even in total darkness, you can _feel_ events as minuscule as a pin drop up to 60 feet away, you might be immune to baseball bats, and- “ I glared at her- “you are _definitely_ immune to fire.” She looked a little sheepish at that last. She’d gotten a bit carried away and stuck her- paw, I guess- directly into the gas burner on the stove, for that last test. I shuddered to think what would have happened if _that_ line on the character sheet had been inaccurate.

“Sorry, it just- for some reason fire doesn’t seem threatening anymore? It almost felt like running water over my hand. Refreshing even.”

“Yes, of course, if the water was literally nine hundred degrees. Luckily you’re fine. Also luckily, we did not test your breath attack, which- if my math is correct- would be about the equivalent of firing a literal, actual M9-7 flamethrower indoors even at your… _reduced_ … age.”

She perked up at this. “Oh yeah! How young am I? And what’s the life expectancy of this body?”

I turned to my reference books- it had not escaped either of us that, _conveniently_ , we had all of the _Pathfinder_ reference material sitting on one of our bookshelves due to a long running game with some friends back before we’d moved. “Uh, it says here you are between zero and five years old, and you’ll get much bigger as you age, on what looks like a logarithmic scale. But you’re functionally… immortal? Huh.” I felt a bit of a pang of jealousy. As many times as we’d talked about transhumanism and wanting to live forever, it was a little melancholy that one of us might actually _experience_ that without the other.

She smirked “Zero and five. So, cradle robbing now? I never knew you had it in you.”

“Oh no, I’ve seen enough anime to know where this is going, miss baby-dragon-who’s-actually-37. No fun in _this_ household until you figure out how to shapechange.”

She looked hurt by what was, in hindsight, my incredibly insensitive statement. “ _Gosh wife sorry you’re some kind of weird mutant now, but I’m just not into cloacas.”_ We’d had talks before about what we’d do if one of us got injured or crippled, and I think we were both secure enough to know that the other would never _leave_ us in those circumstances, but the idea that one of us might suddenly just not be _into_ the other was fresh, and a little jarring. We sat in silence for a minute.

I cleared my throat and soldiered on. “Your Feats appear to have filled out automatically, giving you some additional physical attributes- toughness, multi-attack, flyby attack- power attack. But you have nothing in your Skills yet, and an astonishingly high 72 points to spend. Presumably these will actually grant you the relevant abilities, somehow.”

She nodded enthusiastically. I could understand- despite the madness of the situation, the opportunity to instantly gain the equivalent of a complete graduate degree in pretty much any “Knowledge” skill in mere seconds was hard to pass up.  “Let’s test that, okay? I’m going to put 2 into Linguistics- one for English, one for Sherriff’s language.” She closed her eyes. “Okay- Sherriff, say something to me.”

_“ <Ma’am I’ll admit I haven’t got the slightest flippin' clue what’s going on. Is this how y’all usually spend your evenings?>” _

She shook her head. “No this is… pretty far from the usual- oh! It worked!” She jumped up and spun in a circle with excitement. Silently, I decided it was just about the cutest goddamn thing I’d ever seen. She settled back down. “Ahem. Okay, verified that spending skill points grants instant expertise. This is incredibly powerful.”

I nodded. “Oh you have no idea. Wrapping up, you can fly, you can also breathe some kind of should-not-exist _paralysis gas,_ and eventually you’re going to gain access to magic. Pathfinder’s not just an RPG system, it’s a _broken_ RPG system. Less broken than the older d20 system, but still. As far as we can tell, you aren’t bound by GM fiat- you are literally getting the Rules-As-Written version of every power. It’s incredibly open to abuse. Once you can cast spells and craft items there are about a dozen ways this whole thing can be exploited, at which point actual apotheosis might be on the table, or at least near-omnipotence in the material universe.”

I expected excitement or at least interest, but instead she almost looked troubled by what I was saying. I was about to ask why when there was a pounding on the door. A _frantic_ pounding.

Suddenly the scene in the living room- destroyed closet, shattered bat, Haley and I spread out on the candlelit floor with a laptop and a half dozen rule books- which had started to feel downright _homey_ despite the presence of the storm at our windows, flashed over into vulnerability. We exchanged a silent look. “What should we do?” I asked.

Haley padded on all fours over to the door. “ _Open_ it, obviously. Try not to hit anyone with a _club_ this time, you _barbarian” -_ this last with a small smile. I assumed that’s what all the teeth meant.

“Hey! I was avenging your death at the hands of-” before I could finish my thought the pounding picked up. A woman’s voice, possibly belonging to our neighbor Amy, picked up over the sound of the fists hammering the wood. “Oh god! Open up! Please! We need help!”

Haley, possibly forgetting (again) that she was literally a monster now, opened the door. Sure enough it was Amy, with her two year old in tow. They spilled damply across our doorstep and into the house, bringing them eye-level with what was at first glance, as I knew from recent experience, a very concerned looking winged alligator. Amy shrieked, a full-throated scream of pure terror that seemed to fill the room, and actually passed out. I wasn’t even sure that was a thing that happened in real life! This was far too much excitement for her kid, who started wailing at the top of her lungs as well.

I shook my head to clear it. “Well, wonder what that was all about? Let’s get her in and comfortable, I guess.” I started forward but stopped when I noticed Haley still peering out into the gloom and rain. I couldn’t see a thing without street lights- perks of draconic vision, I guessed.

She spoke quietly. “I think I see what had her so terrified. Sean? I don’t think it was just us that the weird shit happened to, tonight.” I heard it then, thinly over the sound of the rain. Doors slamming, cars honking, people screaming out in the night, dogs barking, _gunshots._ It sounded like the apocalypse.

“< _H_ _ey you out there, it’s alright. Come on in. Can you understand me? >” _Somewhere she’d started speaking Sherriff’s language. In just a moment I could see why- a hulking mantis-like creature stooped and squeezed its way through our front door as Haley backed up to make space. The child screamed even louder, and I reflexively tensed up before Sherriff tapped me on the shoulder mentally.

“Haley, that’s a woodcutter vessel. Used by carpenters. You guessed correctly- it’s from Sherriff’s world.” I walked over to the kid, trying to comfort her with some human presence as I spoke directly to it- “ _ <Hello stranger! Come in out of the rain. I’m Sean, and also Sherriff, and if tonight has been half as strange for you as it was for us, you probably need to take a seat.>” _

The mantis-woodcutter almost looked- sheepish? It put one clawed hand up behind its head and gazed at the floor as it spoke. “< _Ah, hello, thank you. I’m Delmutt. Do you know what’s going on? Only I was at home asleep, and then I woke up to screaming and I was on a really small mattress with_ **_that_ ** _thing, and it started throwing things and then_ **_I_ ** _started screaming- >” _He (she?) - was getting really worked up and Sherriff prompted me to put up a hand to delay her. Luckily the gesture translated.

_Hey Sherriff what do you guys do for gender anyway? Why am I interpreting Delmutt as a she?_

_ <When you wear a lot of bodies it doesn’t really tend to matter, but some of us prefer one gender for our vessels. Myself I’m pretty neutral, Delmutt’s got a bit of an accent, she might lean female- no harm in assumin’.> _

She sat down, as Haley tried to speak. (I found it somewhat ironic that my wife was probably going to have an easier time speaking to infomorph aliens for a while than she would speaking to human beings.) “ _ <It’s alright, this night’s been kind of crazy. I’m not usually this shape, and Sean here doesn’t usually have one of you living in his brain. We now have three separate cases that would indicate something of a pattern. Assuming we aren’t the center of this thing then-> _ I’m sorry, Sean, can you do something with the girl? I can’t hear myself think.”

The kid _did_ have an impressive set of lungs and wasn’t afraid to use them. I continued to make soothing noises, while checking on her mother, who was starting to come around. “Shhh shhh, don’t worry, no monsters here, just weird shaped people, kiddo. Look, see? Mom’s waking up and _she_ understands that she _should not panic_ don’t you Amy, let’s all just _not panic_ while my wife the dragon and miss alien bug woodcutter over there have a conversat-” Amy, now fully awake, finally realized that her monster had joined us in the living room. Apparently deciding that the dragon was fine but that the mantis was _entirely_ too far, she resumed yelling.

“That thing ate Tom! It ate my husband!” She pointed and stared, wild eyed.

I tried to moderate. “Now, okay, things are real weird tonight. Pretty sure based on the one in my head-" _that_ drew an alarmed look- " that these aliens are infovores though- sorry, that means they eat _information,_ not people, as a rule of thumb. Did you _see_ miss Delmutt over there eat your husband? Has it done anything violent towards you since then? < _Miss Delmutt did you eat her husband by any chance? > _” Delmutt shook her head emphatically no, still in conversation with Haley. It was a weirdly human gesture coming from a bug monster.

Amy hesitated. “... No, but I went to bed with Tom and woke up next to it! What else could it be?”

“Well, why don’t you sit tight and we’ll all work to figure that out. Haley, what are you going on about over there?”

“I was just saying to our new friend here that there’s obviously some kind of body-swap going on. I got one, Tom got swapped for her, you sort of got the brain portion of one…? On top of that, you and Tom are both swapped with something from the same reality, and I’ve got something from fiction. We can’t rule out that these aliens are from a fictional setting-”

“It doesn’t _feel_ fictional, based on my memories, but go on.”

“Right, so, out of 5 people here present, 3 had something happen tonight. And it sounds like a lot more based on what I’m hearing out there. Depending on how widespread this is- city, state, _planetary_ \- there could be a lot of people in trouble tonight. And if Amy and her daughter are typical, you and I might be the only two, uh, ‘Universal’ translators around.”

She turned and looked out the open door, into the raging storm. We’d walked in and out of that door every day for two years, ever since we moved to this city. The neighborhood was so ingrained I didn’t even notice it on my way through anymore. But tonight that door felt like a threshold into the unknown, even so.

She turned back and I could see the concern in those giant catlike eyes. “We need a plan.”


	3. Chapter 3

“I don’t think we _have_ to do this, is all I’m saying.” I said this even as I filled up the backpack. “I know you want to save the world but how many can we possibly help by going out there tonight? A dozen, a hundred? And we have next to no information. We could be totally wrong and it’s monsters from a hundred different worlds!”

Haley, with astonishing dexterity, slipped one wing through the pack and slung it over her back. “Well, first of all, husbands who attack their wives with _bats_ automatically lose all arguments for the next 24 hours, it’s in the manual. Second of all, we’ll save the world for every individual we help out there tonight, as the cliche goes. _Third_ of all, it’s not just direct contact- we’re going to empower them to save _themselves,_ weren’t you listening?” She huffed in exasperation.

Of course I had been, but I didn’t want to acknowledge the sense of it even as I sent my wife out into danger. We’d written two messages, one in English and one in Sherriff’s written language, which we were just calling Morphish for lack of any better term (his word for it still translated as English in my brain, frustratingly). Sherriff’s letter was written out by hand, and boy was trying to write legibly in an alien alphabet that you knew but had never written before a fun experience.

Both letters laid out the situation as we understood it and gave directions to a rally point for our “Visitors”- we’d decided on the city’s dual football/baseball stadium complex- where we could try and direct authorities and set up some kind of crisis control. The idea was that each infomorph we encountered would get the alien letter for themselves, and the english letter to help pacify any humans around who could be calmed down enough to read as they gathered more infomorphs together and made for the stadium, maybe 20 miles distant.

Using Tom and Amy’s generator for power and our own printer as a sort of impromptu Kinko’s, we’d scanned and printed several hundred copies already. Haley and Amy were going to go distribute these around the neighborhood while I watched her child and Delmutt, printed more copies, and tried to call emergency services. So far, I couldn’t get through- either cell service was down, or it was being jammed as pretty much everyone in town attempted to place a call at once.

Haley and Amy said goodbye and headed out into the gloom and rain. It was well past 11pm now, and the immediate sounds of violence and distress were harder to detect, but my heart was in my throat as they disappeared. What _was_ all this? It was chaos- nothing made any sense. Yesterday I’d been a computer programmer with a stable career, in a loving marriage with the most brilliant woman I’d ever met in my life. Today she was some kind of superhero but also half an animal, and I was… still me, in a world that might be collapsing?

I felt the mental equivalent of a hand on my shoulder. < _Self, I can’t rightly say I’ve been in too many scrapes worse’n this. But let me tell you- that doubt you’re feeling, that’s natural. Ain’t no person on this or any other world ever felt like they were really ready, when the time came callin’. We’re jes’ not born to it. But you’re doin’ fine. Keep moving forward, and don’t you stray from her side. You two can get each other through this. > _

A pause. < _Also, I could use a gun. > _

I didn’t own one, I’d always been kind of opposed to the whole _concept_ of lethal force. But Tom… might? We hadn’t known Tom and Amy well, before this. We worked our 9 to 5s and they worked theirs, and we might wave at each other over the back porch once in a while, but I’d never been in their house. Delmutt was actually getting along shockingly well with the kid, who was gradually winding down towards sleep now that the immediate excitement about the big giant mantis lady was over. I decided to break yet another taboo and go rob my neighbors.

It wasn’t much of a burglary, to be honest. The front door was still wide open where Amy had burst out of it, and while the house was unlit with the power outage, the layout was similar enough to ours that I had no trouble finding the master bedroom. Soon enough I was in the master closet, and I had a few things that might come in handy tonight- Tom’s bike leathers and helmet, the keys to his Harley, and a 9mm that he’d kept in a holster by his bedside. _Thank god for lax American gun safety habits, I guess._ _Sherriff, can you use this?_ < _Oh, yes. Little fancy for my tastes but I’ve fired stranger, from stranger hands than these. >_

I took the motorcycle from their garage for good measure and wheeled it over to our place, where Amy and Haley were returning, soaked through. Well, _Amy_ was. The water just steamed off of Haley seconds after she got through the door. The _temperature_ on that body… anyway. Amy looked at me with a raised eyebrow when she saw what I was carrying, but I gestured back outside and said, “For phase 2. How’d phase 1 go?”

Haley answered. “The problem is _very_ widespread. Half of everyone we encountered had been swapped for infomorph vessels. Nobody else got one in their brains, or magic powers, though, so nobody could bridge the communication gap. The smarter people had figured out that nobody meant any harm, and we had some success handing out the flyers there. The more panicked ones…” she trailed off, looked downcast.

Amy spoke up. “They’re killing each other out there. We saw. I saw. A lot of blood, a lot of bodies. We did what we could, broke it up where we could. But it’s too much.”

Haley chimed in. “Sean if this is happening all over the world- this really could be the end of civilization. We got as many people and infomorphs distributing copies of the flyer as we could, but- not even a dozen out of the whole neighborhood. If people meet this in violence on day one it’s just going to get easier on day two. I don’t think we _can_ stop it.” She choked up a bit.

I knelt down and hugged her. Sure enough, she was like a little oven- radiating heat just inches from her skin. Scales? Whatever. She was my hero and I held her until she knew it. “You said it yourself- you’re stopping it with everyone you contact. We just have to go wider. The flyers all had instructions for tuning to the local public radio station- now we need to get a human-to-infomorph signal running. Just like we planned, one step at a time. I looked up the tower’s location and I got the bike ready. Saddle up, we’ve got a trip ahead of us and you’re the only one who can see in the dark.”

We said our goodbyes to Amy and Delmutt, the two awkward in each other’s presence but at least not frightened, not any longer. I got on the bike leathers and stepped out into the rain. Tom was a bigger guy than I was, but they fit well enough. For some reason the loose fitting leather added to my growing sense of unreality though.

Haley climbed up behind me on the seat, neck and forelimbs wrapped over my shoulders. She was practically more of a backpack than a passenger. She shouted into my ear, through rain and helmet- “I didn’t even have time to ask, dear, why’d you get the bike?”

“This is a rapture scenario, half the people on earth- _or more-_ just got vanished. This neighborhood rolls up the sidewalks after 9pm so we haven’t seen many accidents, but there’s bound to be chaos on the highways. We _need_ to get to the public radio station if we want to get the word out to as many people as possible, and a bike’s probably our only hope for navigating tonight. I’ll go slow.”

As I keyed the ignition I had to admit, full biker getup, a pistol on my hip and a roaring engine underneath me did feel _remarkably_ badass. I could see why Tom kept the thing around- like I was ready to save the world. Or at least the local municipality. ‘Keep those wings tucked up. Last thing I need is a parachute deploying from my back when we’re on the highway.” With a roar, we were off.

Pulling out of our little suburb, the roads were a _disaster_. infomorphs did not, as a rule, know how to drive anything more advanced than a stagecoach. Sherriff was in the back of my mind having some kind of panic attack even at the low speeds we were traveling. Easily half the cars on the two lane access road were in the ditch, and most of the rest were simply parked, the occupants having stopped and gotten out, either to flee from each other or to do god-knows-what. It would have been completely impassable without the slim profile of the motorcycle and the eagle-eyed night vision of the dragon on my back.

Within five minutes of starting, Haley took off- I’d genuinely forgotten she could do that- and looped around my head before waving me over to one particularly imposing-looking semi, wrecked into a concrete siding and half leaning out over the creek below. Just _looking_ at that mangled mess, I didn’t have a good feeling about what we were going to see.

Up close it was substantially worse. The truck _must_ have been going overspeed when… whatever it was… had happened, and it immediately lost control. What was left of the front was a ruin of steel and glass, and if it weren’t for the trailer attached, it would already have fallen the twenty feet to the creek below. At first I didn’t believe there could possibly be any survivors, but as Haley landed on the remains of the cabin door and begin _literally tearing it apart holy shit_ \- I assumed she must have sensed something moving inside. Halting the bike, I climbed off and called up the side to her. “Can you get them out?”

She was still tunneling through the remains of the door. Whatever her claws were made of, apparently they did not have any substantial problems with rolled aluminum or whatever truck cabin doors were made of these days. “I think so! It’s an infomorph, they look injured! < _Sherriff, what is a spinal injury like for you guys? >” _

He called back. “ _ <We’ve got exoskeletons, so probably not like yours. We still feel pain though. But most bodily injuries, like paralysis, is more of a temporary condition for us, so we hain’t really got any procedures, ma’am. Just change bodies. Round these parts there may not be any spare bodies though, leastwise not for a few months. Still if I had to choose between the fall or the rescue, I’d take rescue any day.>” _

She nodded, seemingly set on some course of action, and snaked her neck down into the smashed cabin. I couldn’t do much from my position on the ground but I got ready to catch her or the vessel if she fell. I shouldn’t have worried, though. Small as she was, the thing she pulled out was smaller- it looked like a variant on the “Scout” body I’d last seen Sherriff wearing. _ <Yep that’s a courier, use em to move mail between settlements. Poor thing, those vessels have almost no density. This is probably a waste of time.> _

She flew to the ground with the insectoid vessel in her mouth, placing it gently on the ground between us while I tried to shelter it from the rain. She mumbled in frustration. “Shit, we can’t take it with us, and I didn’t think to set up a triage center. _Damnit!_ We can’t leave it to die!” I didn’t have answers for her.

“I think we have to, honey. We’ve got to get moving or we’ll lose a lot more. Here-” I took off the leather jacket, and was immediately soaked. “I can at least make it comfortable, and we can leave a copy of the flyers and some road flares. Others should be coming this way if they follow our instructions, they’ll find it.” I put the jacket over it to keep out the rain, and lit two flares a respectable distance away. We both stood silently for a minute before getting on the bike and driving away. It was the hardest moment so far in a night that had already been too stressful, for both of us.

Even after that, the going was extremely slow. We _couldn’t_ slow down and talk to every infomorph or human. We got into a system- as we approached a wreck, I’d drop below 15 mph and Haley would grab a sheaf of flyers out of our bags, then fly over to the occupants, drop them off, and catch back up. A surprising number of humans did not have much reaction to a small reptile winging out of the night to hand-deliver flyers to them- I assumed they’d had enough trauma for one night that this small bit of madness didn’t even register. The infomorphs were almost universally more receptive and grateful to get _any_ indication of what was going on. Those that were still conscious, at least.

It was half an hour out, having left our access road and hit the highway proper, that we finally encountered another group who’d had the presence of mind to _act_ amid the chaos. Unfortunately it was the local highway patrol, and they were in full paramilitary panic.

We heard the sound of gunfire before we saw them, around another two wrecks. Six officers in body armor, shotguns and rifles pointed at the thoroughly-punctured remains of a UHaul van. Two people cowered on the other side of their squad cars, red-and-blue lights going full blast, adding another note of disorientation to the scene. I tried to motion Haley down behind my back and hit the brights on the cycle so they couldn’t see us clearly- I had a sinking feeling that I knew what was going on here.

Unfortunately she didn’t take my meaning, or the urgency of the situation overwhelmed her. She took off from my back and raced through the air toward the officers, shouting over the rain. “Wait! Whoever’s in there, they didn’t mean any harm! They-” an officer with a shotgun whirled towards the sound, got a split second flash of something with wings and claws and _teeth_ coming at him, and unloaded. The roar split the air and momentarily overwhelmed all other sound, for me. All I could see was Haley, dropping to the ground like a heap of wet laundry, without a sound. The rest of the officers turned towards her, weapons levelling.

Somehow Tom’s pistol was in my hand.

I could _feel_ Sherriff taking over my arm, my shoulder, guiding me as I raised it. _You’d better do some real Roland Deschain shit, Sherriff, or she’s a dead woman._ Like lightning, he started snapping shots off. One shot, and the shotgun aimed at Haley jerked out of the officer’s hands, trailing shrapnel. _Two_ shots, and the man next to him dropped his rifle as he stumbled back, clutching his hand. _Three_ shots, and- the last went wide as I had to drop to the ground behind the cycle, avoiding a hail of bullets from two with the presence of mind to fire back.

As I huddled I muttered at Sherriff- “Holy shit, where’d you learn to shoot?” _ <Took me more years than you’ve been out in the world, son. Sorry I couldn’t get them all.> _

The rapidly approaching end of my life was interrupted, though. On hands and knees behind the bike, I saw Haley stir on the ground. Not dead, then- that was good. She took a moment to assess our position. I didn’t see how she had any hope of changing the situation, but she had a better handle on it than I did. She cocked her head back, and with a roar like a blast furnace opening, shot a stream of blue-white fire twenty feet into the air.

In the silence afterwards I heard another muttered “Holy _shit._ ” Was that me, or one of the officers? Didn’t matter. We were all thinking it. Haley took advantage of the interruption and roared with a voice like a foghorn “Okay everybody **fucking FREEZE** . Just… nobody wants to hurt you, okay? Stand down.” I don’t know if it was her tone of voice, or the absolute deadeye position that Sherriff’s arm and handgun were maintaining as I stood from behind the bike, but they stopped. It was evident to _me_ that we could have killed them if that was the intent. Hopefully they were coming to the same conclusion.

I jumped off the bike and ran to Haley, still keeping one eye on the officers the whole time. “Honey! Where’d you get hit?”

She groaned and looked at me, spitting blood. “Ugh. _Everywhere._ I have a new appreciation for what ducks go through during hunting season.” If she could quip, she was fine. Still keeping my eyes, and arm, pointed toward the officers, I poked her with one boot. “Do you have any holes in you?”

She got off the ground and checked herself. “... No, actually. I felt the round hit, it was _way_ worse than that bat, but I guess it deflected? I have an enormous sore spot right on my chest though. I don’t know how hard these scales are.”

I sighed in relief. “Uh, top of my head, you should be about as tough as a person wearing full plate right now. You’re not bulletproof and you probably have some real damage internally so try not to make any sudden moves for a minute, okay? Let me talk to these people. Make sure your ribs are okay.”

I walked to the officers, who had now- mostly, save one guy who still thought he was covering us- stood down, trying to bandage the two with injured hands. I did not lower the handgun. At this point I wasn’t sure if it was me or Sherriff in charge of that arm but we were of one mind on that. These fuckers had been running around shooting confused innocents, they got no slack from me. One of them- tall, muscled, mustache- spoke to me. “You and that thing, you can talk to each other?”

I came to a halt a few feet away. “That’s my wife. Whatever you’ve been shooting tonight? _Whoever_ you’ve been shooting? Might’ve been someone you knew, too.” Not strictly true but I needed them thinking about the infomorphs as people as soon as possible.

They looked a little taken aback. Mustache spoke again. “But we- I- one minute I had a lady on the side of the road for a ticket, the next minute one of _those_ came out of the car at me. We thought it was some kind of invasion! You’re saying what, they _transformed?_ How come none of them said anything then?”

I backed up and sidestepped to the back of the UHaul. Sure enough there was an infomorph’s vessel inside, now quite dead. “Did you look at any of them? Did you see any way for them to make human noises? Look, officer, something weird’s going on here. A lot of people got body swapped with these things, and I got one in my head.” They tensed a bit at this, but did not go for their guns- “I’ve been talking to it and as far as I can tell they’re just people. Confused, scared people in a world that’s reacting with violence to their presence. It’s our job to help them. An hour ago, maybe I’d have said different. But now I’ve been out here, seen them- we _have_ to try. We can’t stay. If I leave you with something written in their language, you can show it to any more you run across, okay? Try to help them, draw in the dirt if you have to.”

Another one, treating the one with the mangled hand, spoke up. “You just shot two police officers, you’re not going-”

I cut them off. While I was talking, momentum was with me. “I’m pretty sure the world is ending. Sean McCarthy, I live down the road in Blackwood. If there’s still a justice system tomorrow come find me and arrest me. In the meantime, sorry about your hands, but try not to kill any more people okay? Here. Show these flyers to them, the one in English says the same thing. We’re leaving now.”

I met Haley back at the bike. “You okay to ride?” I asked, mounting up. She climbed up behind me and spoke into my ear again. “I’m- I hurt, but I don’t think any ribs are broken. Just go.”

We went.


	4. Interlude - Eat Me

“It was much pleasanter when I was younger,” said Cecilia to the Wiltshire Dog. “I only ever grow smaller here, and I liked it when I could expect to be larger sometimes, too.”

“Who’s to say you’re shrinking at all? One size is as good as another, I say” said the Dog, who had it all good and well, already being quite large, in Cecilia’s opinion. “It’s really more about the size of the room. Maybe you’ve been the same size all along and the room’s just been growing, eh?”

She paced. The psych ward _did_ have small rooms, and lately she hadn’t got out as much. “I don’t think they can do that, Dog. People can’t just grow a room, not with lots of sneaking about and rearranging of furniture. Only they haven’t let me out in so long it’s hard to tell. Can you even know the size of a thing from inside?”

The Dog walked up the wall and across the ceiling. “You _can,_ in the only way that matters- which is to say you _Kant._ What is there to know from outside? Not the thing-in-itself! Mere observations, illusions of the whole! But from the inside, oh my- now we _are_ the thing, and can know it through-and-through! So, what say you? Have we been shrinking all along?”

Cecilia shook her head. “We haven’t and I think _you’re_ talking nonsense. Just yesterday you told me not even _God_ could know a thing entire!”

The Dog grinned and turned its head upside down, which made it rather more rightside-up from Cecilia’s position but did leave it looking rather uncomfortable there on the ceiling. “I said _Gödel,_ as I recall. Deification may be a little premature.”

Cecilia stamped her foot at the Dog. “Banish all your rubbish! I want out! They say I’m not well and that it’s dangerous, but they also keep saying it’s in my head and if it is, what does it matter where my head is at?”

At this the Dog’s head disconnected entirely, and began drifting about the room as his body chased its own tail on the ceiling. “Oh it matters a great deal, and not at all, depending on what you’re using it for. I hardly _ever_ find my head in the same place twice, these days, but then I only use it to spout nonsense at little girls. _You_ tried to tell people about the Consumption, and so find yourself with very little head-room at all.”

She crossed her arms. “It was for their own good! It’s like taking your vegetables, unpleasant at first but much worse if you don’t. How can they lock me up for telling them the truth? _I_ once locked away Susie Ann in a closet for saying my hair looked like a trollop’s, but it _was_ true and later I felt awful over it besides. _These_ doctors don’t feel awful at all!”

The Dog, now just a wicked long set of teeth in the air, seemed to smile. “ _You_ have Consumed, so _you_ have nothing to fear from Him. If they don’t listen, that’s their lookout. They’ll feel awful in the end, one way or another.” But Cecilia had stopped listening at the mention of _Him._ A chill came over her, all of the sudden, and she fancied it would be much warmer under the bed.

Scrambling under, trying to ignore the rolls of thunder from the storm even now gathering outside, she elbowed her way past the Floormouse who was having none of it “Oi! Shove off, you great galoot! You’re taking up all my space!”

Cecilia sighed exasperatedly. “Oh, not _this_ again. _I_ say it’s big enough for us both, and more besides. If you agree and we’re the only two here, then it must be so, for who else could know? So be agreeable and let me in before _He_ comes.”

The Floormouse was in anything but an agreeable mood. “I will _not!_ Who d’you think you are, coming in here and manhandling epistemology like that! These are sensitive subjects, and you have no degree that _I_ can see? Trying to tell me what I might think, like some kind of _solipsist!_ I declare myself empirical!” He shoved her back out and pulled the bedsheets down like a curtain.

Cecilia had no _time_ for this, no time at all. “I don’t care _what_ you’re emperor of, please just let me under! _He’s_ coming and I shan’t like to let him see me. Please!” Real desperation was creeping into her voice. There was nowhere else to go! She’d already Consumed, to make herself smaller, and it had worked once but what if it didn’t anymore!

Perhaps sensing her rising panic, the Floormouse hesitated. “I would, dear girl, but we cannot both exist in a space that we disagree on the nature of! There is only one way to resolve an impasse like this.” He paused, dramatically, as if waiting for her. She obliged him if only to get it over with.

“There is?”

“Oh yes! With a _conference!_ ”

\---

Marilyn Radcliffe had been with the hospital for twenty years but had only worked the psych ward for the last three. Still, she knew the names and faces of the people on her floor pretty well, and she was _pretty sure_ that none of them were supposed to be out after 9pm.

She jumped up when she heard a door open and close in the south wing. Somebody had the genius idea to build the nurse station around one corner of the L-shaped ward, so there was a whole half a wing that was out of her line of sight. Cameras? Not on this budget. “And now they can’t even lock the damn rooms at shift change, gimme a break…” she muttered, rounding the corner.

Through the night-lite gloom of the ward hallway, a 3 foot tall white rabbit in a waistcoat was coming towards her in short little hops. It looked like it had come in from… the emergency exit? “But that’s a one-way door-” she said, somewhat oblivious to the hirsute gentleman approaching.

“Lucky for me I only went through the one way, then!” The rabbit said, doffing his cap. “Pardon me miss but have you directions to Cecilia’s room? Only I’m terribly late for a conference.”

Marilyn shook her head slowly, as if in a dream. Something was wrong here, this wasn’t- “No, sorry, no visitors after 6pm. Certainly no conferences.”

The statuesque owl in a flat cap (had it always been there?) laid a wing on the rabbit’s shoulder and took over. “But we are _conferring_ right now! Hypocrisy, I say! And anyway we are hardly visitors, we’ve been here long as you have!”

Marilyn backed up, wobbled, fell on her rear as the world seemed to rotate around and _through_ her. “No, what- I- you can’t be, what am I-” quietly, muffled by the thick doors and soundproofing, loud thumps and crashes could be heard coming from half the rooms on the floor. Somehow the sounds of her charges in distress cut through the fog and she leapt to her feet. “What are you?!? What’s happening to my patients?!”

The rather irritated-looking jackdaw spoke up “Well by the evidence it seems they have been getting by with a terrible nurse! Please, miss, we are terribly busy and I- oh, good, looks like the Owl’s been useful for once. Come on rabbit, reality’s not going to make observations about itself! Unless it does, of course...” Hands out to secure their charming animal-sized british frippery, they hurried away down the hall. Marilyn wanted to pursue but she was captivated by the sight through the nearest bedroom window. Something… _insectoid_ was clattering around in there, like a mantis the size of a person.

She stumbled back for the second time in as many moments and screamed. She’d gone mad, she had to have, have developed _some_ kind of disorder, but she _knew_ that. If she’d truly lost it, shouldn’t she not recognize what was happening as being unusual? She ran through symptoms in her head. Definite confusion, definite fear- appropriate to the situation though- no drug abuse, no long term dissociative episodes or mood swings. It didn’t _feel_ like psychosis, but this couldn’t be real.

She turned to head back to the nurse’s station, and stopped abruptly. There had been no doors opening or closing this time but there, at the turn in the ward hall, was a silhouette. It didn’t make _sense_. The angles shouldn’t- the limbs can’t move like- _too many-_ it turned towards her, and she saw its face. After that, whether or not she had _been_ mad became an entirely academic point.

\---

“Now then!” said the Floormouse, imperiously banging his Empiricist’s Gavel. It made a hard rap-rap-rap on the linoleum floor of the room. “I declare this meeting objectively called to order!”

The little parliament of animals around Cecilia thrummed with anger and objection. “You can’t just _declare_ objective truths, you dunce!” said the jackdaw. “You have to _observe_ them! As anyone can see, this conference is far from orderly. More of a mob, than a gathering of intellectuals.”

Cecilia, biting her fingernails while glancing at the door, hummed nervously. “Can’t we all agree that Floormouse misspoke and we should all come to order anyway? I do so love these games my dears but _he’s coming_ and we really need to sort this out before he gets here!” The hemming and anger grew worse, if anything.

“ _Games!_ You call them _games?”_ Shouted the owl, indignant. “We are here to debate the very nature of _reality_ , stupid girl! Life or death pale in comparison. Now, as soon as we figure out whether we are, in fact, merely _observed_ to be ordered or _invited to order ourselves,_ we can-”

“ _My_ life feels very important indeed,” said Cecilia, growing heated. “And these semantic quibbles are all good and well when we while away the hours but _nobody here has Consumed!_ He might ignore me but we must help all the others!” Sure enough, a loud thumping could be heard even through the thick wall to her right. Cecilia _never_ heard the others on the floor, only the once when Mrs. Henderson had an episode in the bath and had to be taken away.

The parliament straightened with concern. “My goodness, you’re right!” said the Rabbit. “Only you did offer them Consumption and they declined, didn’t they? What more can you do?”

“Force them!” said the Floormouse, seeing an opportunity to regain center stage. “For their own good, they must Consume!” The ruckus grew once again. A _real_ mob was in danger of forming, behind him. Half the conference seemed firmly for, and half firmly against, the concept of coercion. “Free will!” “Nobless oblige!” “Might makes right!” “Kratocracy!”

Cecilia clutched her hands to her head in the midst of the bedlam. A scream rang out. The sound pierced the cacophony, stilling all the animals in the midst of beating one another silly with tiny canes and shillelaghs. “I say, was that you?” asked the Floormouse. Cecilia paused and thought for a second.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think it was me after all. I think that was the nurse. _He’s here._ ”

Like magic they evaporated into the dark corners of the room, as if they’d never been. Mice and birds and tiny men with outlandish hats all scampered, leaving but a few feathers and vestments to show they’d ever been. “It’s okay, the door’s locked, and they keep saying it’s all in my head. None of this is real, none of this is real” repeated Cecilia, even as she backed into the corner furthest from the door.

But she couldn’t make herself believe. The scraping _was_ real, terribly real, like a thing too wide for the hallway it found itself in, trying to pull itself along by hand. Scraaaaaape, and pause, scraaaaaape, and pause, and as she realized _he_ was taking the time to look in _each and every room through the window_ it was already too late to cover hers. It had never been like this before, what _was_ this? Another scraaaaaaape and the thin light from the hall went black. A single eye, lidless, was all she could see through the glass panel on the door.

The handle began to turn.

“I really do think it best we were off _right now_ ,” said the Wiltshire Dog, through the doorway behind her.

“What- but there’s- you couldn’t make a door _before?” s_ he asked indignantly, even as she scrambled through the low opening and onto his broad back.

“I was less substantial, before,” said the Dog, leaping away from the third story into the night. “Something or other has changed, for the better. So long as we keep _him_ at bay.”

“Yes” said the Floormouse, climbing out of the pocket of her nightgown where he’d hidden away. “I don’t think even that cantankerous old collection of misbegotten appetizers from a huntsman’s table will disagree anymore.”

The streets flew by and Cecilia tasted freedom for the first time in years, even as she bound herself to a new task. “ _Everyone’s_ got to Consume. For their own good.”


	5. Chapter 5

Waking up on the floor of a stadium’s VIP suite was more than a little disorienting. The large, unfamiliar room was full of richly appointed furniture, sunlight, and a sleeping dragon. Outside, the storm had blown over and the sun was up- I hoped it wasn’t past noon.

Our overnight trip to the radio station was relatively uneventful, except for another few pile-ups that we’d passed on the way. There had been someone on hand at the station, thankfully, who agreed to record and loop our messages directing listeners to the stadium area. I shook his hand and told him he was saving more lives than he knew, before we took off into the night again.

Then the motorcycle died on us- apparently a hail of police gunfire isn’t _great_ for engines, who knew? Haley wasn’t strong enough to carry me in flight, so we ended up having to walk several hours in the pre-dawn gloom before we reached the stadium and collapsed. Even then, vessels and the occasional human had been trickling in. Now, though- I got up and looked through the glass down onto the field.

Now there were _thousands._

I’d been to Yankee Stadium once, when my sister graduated NYU. We’d all flown in, just a big family of midwest yokels in the big city, and that stadium had blown my mind. Bill Clinton had been the guest speaker and the place had been _packed-_ easily twice as many people in that one place as in our entire home town.

We weren’t looking at those kinds of numbers yet, but I was feeling a similar kind of awe. _We did this- all these people, here because of us._ It had only been a few hours. The stands, and parts of the field, were filling up. Infomorphs of every shape and size lined them, huddled, cold, hungry. Hohmann Stadium could probably seat 40,000 and I doubted it was even a quarter full. Still- ten thousand people were potentially looking to us for guidance.

I didn’t wake Haley. She’d… grown larger, overnight. If a Pathfinder dragon’s size was tied to age, she was growing at a… _substantially_ faster rate than she should have been. By my mental estimates she was easily 6 feet from tail to tip now. _Almost the next age category then._ That would put her at somewhere around 5 years of draconic growth _per day_. _Or, Great Wyrm size, somewhere around Godzilla in scale, in less than a year. Oh, honey…_

I loved my wife. That was _not_ in doubt. If she’d been crippled, or gotten sick, or some other calamity had befallen her, I’d have known how to stand by her no matter what it took. _But she’s the Chosen One now. This is some kind of fucked-up inverse isekai, with a whole alien world come to_ us, _and something picked_ her _to handle it_. I didn’t know that, of course. It _could_ have been wholly coincidental that she just _happened_ to get the most ludicrous power-up in litRPG history, on the same day that the world began to end. Even if it was, though, I knew her. Once she had the power, the outcome was never in doubt.

_She’s going to save them._

Where did a husband fit in? A soft, squishy husband full of extremely killable organs? I couldn’t fly or fight. One good shot last night would have ended me before we even got started. My skill sets were limited to writing business software architecture and running role-playing scenarios. _I can’t even fix a picket fence, we call her dad in for that._ I could advise, and support, but chasing after her? I knew her goal was important, and I supported her in that, I was willing to die for that if need be, but what could I really contribute? I knew she might get herself killed if she didn’t have people to cover her. But soon enough she’d find companions more capable than me, if this ran the way I thought it was. And then?

_You’re going to outgrow me, dearest. Maybe you already have._

She stirred, and called out. “Sean? I had the _weirdest_ dream- oh.” She sounded almost disappointed, to discover her form hadn’t changed back overnight.

I put on a brave face and chuckled as I walked over to hug her. “Not a dream. Still a dragon. Still helping people. Wake up, honey.” She clambered to all fours- now three feet high, easily- and ambled over to the window, propping up on her hind legs to look out.

“Oh. There’s so many- _oh._ Sean, what are we going to tell all of them? What are they going to _eat_? We have to- to-” she was working herself into a panic.

I felt Sherriff take over my vocal cords, let it happen- “< _Easy there miss, you’ve been doing fine. Afore Sean went t’sleep I asked a few of my kind to see what you had around here that they could digest and give us some options when we woke up. You take your time, and remember you ain’t all on your lonesome here. You’ll need to delegate some, in a situation like this. >” _

She nodded, still staring out the window. “It just feels unreal. People, I mean, _human_ people, never looked to me for anything. I was just a student, and then a TA, and then a teacher, and I mean that’s some kind of authority, but in a crisis? Everyone’s probably waiting on a presidential address, or something. But we moved first, and now all _these_ people... “

She laughed, lightly, but it turned into a hiccuping sob. “ _Hulp- erp-_ ohh that’s really unpleasant with this throat.” She sat down, back to the window and the issue of our growing dependents. “Sean… I don’t think I can _do_ this. Any of this.”

Wait, what?

I just waited. Eventually she waved one paw and elaborated. “The idea I have in my mind, this fantasy hero, it isn’t _me._ I loved the _thought_ of being the smartest person in the room, the one who made the impossible connection, who stood up and saved the world. But... “ she trailed off.

I tried a prompt. “But not like this?”

She nodded eagerly. “Yes! I didn’t want the world to end for my fantasy. The thing about being a hero was it meant something had to have gone terribly wrong, for a huge number of people. All the stories focus on the aftermath, the unconnected person coming to clean it up. They never have to tell everyone how to _live._ But now something terrible _has_ happened, here, to these people, and here I am getting stronger and bigger but not any smarter as far as _I_ can tell, and I’m just wondering… am I supposed to know what to do? Am I failing right now? Did I-” she choked again. “Whatever this is. Did I cause this?”

“Oh, Haley.” I walked to her, bent down and held her again. She was radiating heat now that she was awake. It was actually rather pleasant on my still-damp clothing. “You know you didn’t. But… maybe something out there thinks you might be able to fix it.”

“But I _can’t!”_ she wailed, voice pitching up. “I’m a _monster_ now and I don’t have the slightest _clue_ what I’m supposed to do! How can I help all these people? They need food, and shelter, and organization, and communication! All we’re doing is _reacting,_ because it’s all coming too _fast._ I want to help them but every time I look down and see claws instead of hands I feel like I’m less-”

“Less what?”

“Less me.”

 _Maybe that’s my role, in all this. To keep you grounded._ I knelt down until I was eye level with her, took that long face in both hands and stared into her eyes. I leaned in slowly, and placed the gentlest kiss I could on top of her nose. It was so hot it made my eyes water. I didn’t react, just held that steady eye contact until her eyelids started to close and she relaxed, the weight of her head settling into my hands. Only then did I risk speaking. “You’ve never been _more_ you, Haley. You’re so _you_ right now that it scares me a little.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed and thought back. “You remember that time, with the homeless guy? You came to see me for lunch at the office, and we saw him camping with his daughter in the stairwell of the parking garage. There’d probably been a thousand people who’d walked by them that day and not thought twice about it. _You_ actually stopped, and asked him why he wasn’t at one of the shelters.”

She laughed. “I did! He said the only places in town wouldn’t take him and his daughter, there was a men’s shelter and one for women and children, and the two of them didn’t want to split up. And I got so _mad-_ “

“That you completely lost track of lunch and went straight down to the shelter to read them the riot act. You were on their case for two weeks before they finally caved and let them stay. That’s always been you, Haley- charging off after the next righteous cause. It’s all I can do to keep up with. But I _have_ kept up, somehow.” I surprised myself with that. “Huh. That’s… true. And I fell in love with you while watching the difference you made.” I held her close. “It doesn’t matter if you have scales or wings or you’re two hundred feet long. The day you _really_ stop wanting to make a difference, _that’s_ the day I’ll worry you’ve stopped being you.”

We stayed that way for a little longer, just letting the day pass over us. The silence was eventually broken by a knock on the door. I looked at Haley and cocked my head. “Whole lot of people out there, waiting on us. You ready?”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “With you, yes. Always.”

\---

There was a small crowd by the front gates. A good number of humans who’d taken our flyers had shown up, at least a hundred among the increasing masses of infomorph vessels heading into the stadium. Among their number was an EMT who’d set up a bit of a triage station, or as much of one as could be managed given that none of us knew the first thing about the alien biology. Still nobody else with the ability to translate, though Sherriff thought he might have some way around that.

Haley walked over to speak to the somewhat jittery-looking med tech, while I consulted the houseguest in my brain. “ _ < When we eat something, we know it, or at least, we can reference it, if we have the tools. Until the body digests it anyway. It’s how we talk to each other, if we’ve got language barriers. Somebody makes a copy of their language center, the other party eats it, then they can talk until it’s all gone. Do that a few times, it starts to become memory, real memory, the kind you can’t digest.>” _ So we could write some kind of translation, copy it out a few thousand times, and the whole species could speak English overnight? _Hmm._

One of the infomorph vessels, a hauler by the look of the beetle-shaped carapace, approached me. “< _Beg pardon sir, you’d be Sherriff’s vessel, right? My name’s Cyran and I’ve been working on the food problem since last night. We got some results you might want to see. >” _The pony-sized beetle led us over to a table where a variety of items were laid out. Books, dvds, papers, smart phones, an external hard drive, various other detritus that we’d determined might contain processable “Food” as the infomorphs understood it.

In their world, they were supported by an entire informational ecology. At the lowest level, “Flora” would subsist on surface measurements- wind force, temperature, the recording of any passing disturbances- usually recorded directly into some cellular matrix and then “Burned” by some mechanism I still didn’t understand, converted in the same way that humans processed food for chemical energy. Higher lifeforms could consume those matrices entirely, placing them in a cavity- usually located around the belly- which would strip them of coherent information without damaging them physically. This information would be processed by these herbivores, consolidated in some way into info-packets which had greater density and higher nutritional value, supporting in turn an ecology of “Carnivores” who exclusively hunted and dined on these livestock, though not usually destructively. In fact, old age and information-borne disease were the two chief causes of mortality in their world, and infomorphs, consciousnesses not bound to one body, could live arbitrarily long lives. It sounded pretty incredible to me- like it _had_ to be intelligently designed, to some purpose. Sherriff assured me that if there was one, his people had never discovered it to date.

But here in our world that ecology didn’t exist. Though it had only been a day, we hadn’t yet encountered any non-sentient life from Sherriff’s world, which was itself probably a big clue if only I knew what to make of it. But for now, it meant they were going to have to see if they could use any of our data as food, or we would begin losing people to starvation within the week.

The little beetle gestured to the table. “< _We tried the papers as you suggested but didn’t get much out of them. We think the language barrier and read-only nature of the pages make the data too indigestible for us. These discs seemed more palatable but we couldn’t get anything off of them, very frustrating. This though! >” _ It held up a small USB stick. I assumed somebody had brought it in with them last night. “ _ <This is incredible! One of these could feed a person for a month, and so easy to get the food off!>” _ That made… a certain amount of sense. Maybe they were only able to interact with memory formats that could easily be overwritten? There was a _lot_ that could be packed into a single USB stick. And they’d be reusable too- this might be the food solution we were looking for. I thanked the beetle-man and started formulating a plan in my head as I walked over to Haley and the medical team.

The EMT had been joined by a veterinary assistant who didn’t seem to be having much more luck- Insects the size of small horses not being very common even in the veterinary profession, I assumed. Haley was trying to intervene, though they seemed a bit reluctant to engage with the talking dragon- a problem we were going to keep having, I was afraid. I put a hand on her shoulder and spoke to the two. “Hello. Thank you for coming out here. What’s troubling you at the moment?”

The EMT gestured at a small crowd. “This biology’s just too different. They don’t have _guts_ , do you understand how weird that is? They’ve got _carapaces_ and _fluids_ and they can definitely make _noises_ but neither of us can tell just from looking if anything’s even broken. Then there’s _this_ little guy- “ here he indicated a mustachioed worm-looking fellow, rather more roly-poly than caterpillar, who kept rearing back and waving his front arms while trying to get at the med supplies. The vet tech was fending him off. “- he obviously wants _something_ but none of us speak his language.”

I nodded, turned to the roly-poly. “ _ <I can translate for you, what’s up?>” _

He calmed down immediately and turned to me. “ _ <Oh! Yes, excellent. I’m a doctor and these fools are preventing me from treating my patients! We’ve got a lot of cuts and breaks here from ‘Encounters’ during our appearance last night, I need to get to work! Tell them to get out of the way.>” _

I laughed. Well, that was why we were under such critical time pressure, after all. They desperately needed some way to communicate. I waved at the two humans. “He says you’re cramping his style. Here, come away and let him work with his patients. You guys stick to humans for now until we figure out how to translate for you.”

I turned to Haley. “In fact, that’s our number one priority and I have at least an inkling of an idea but it might be insane. Sherriff, could you duplicate the language portion of your brain and let one of these guys eat it?”

Haley started, but before she could speak Sherriff responded- audibly, for her benefit. “ _ <Nope, don’t think there’s space in here for that. But whatever I’m riding in seems a lot more like our brains than it does like yours. Might be I could move my whole self into some other vessel and we could make copies from there. Course you’d have to stick your head in one o’ their stomachs, and I can’t guarantee it’d be safe. Or that we’d understand each other once we were separated. Up to you.>” _

Haley spoke up immediately. “Sean, that’s way too risky. We need to at least test a non-human brain first. Even anecdotally! < _Hey, has anyone tried to eat anything living since they got here? Ask around. > _” Word spread through the camp quickly and we soon found three different infomorphs who’d managed to catch various “Wildlife-” two cats and what sounded like a possum- with nothing to show for it but a lot of scratches. That was three points in favor of letting one of them try to eat my head, as far as I was concerned. Haley was still opposed.

I pulled her aside. “Sherriff can’t live in my head forever, and _we_ don’t have the resources to run this crowd around.”

She glared at me. “You’re being reckless! What if something happens to you?”

I shrugged. “Well, ideally, you think fondly enough of me to wish me back to full health with the literal resurrection powers you should be sporting in a couple of months. It’s a moderate risk as far as I’m concerned.”

She rocked back a bit at that. I didn’t think her power curve had really registered with her yet. “I just… _wait!”_ She whipped her head around and I turned to see what she was looking at. Sure enough the vet tech had gone and gotten tired of our dithering and stuck her damn fool head into the belly cavity of one of the laborer beasts, largest of the vessels by far. Seeing the entirety of her head disappear into that hole I suddenly felt a _lot_ less confident about my decision to stick my _own_ cranium in there. But seconds later she popped her head out and gave a thumbs up.

“Didn’t even smell bad!”

So that settled that. I checked with Sherriff. _You ready? Come back and visit me, okay?_ I felt the mental equivalent of a nod. _Alright, let’s get you out of our skull._ Walking over to the labourer, I patted his side and knelt down underneath. He was almost horse-high, so it wasn’t too cramped to get below him. I took a deep breath, and put my head up into the cavity.

It wasn’t like being eaten. It wasn’t even like getting an MRI, though there was that same sense of an invisible _field_ being present, some great energy that you couldn’t really see or interact with but that permeated the dark interior of the labourer’s body. I waited for a tingle in my head, something to tell me it was done, and for a long time felt nothing at all, but then-

I was-

We were-

Sherriff was out of my head-

I was in the mindspace of the labourer vessel-

But I could still feel everything he thought-

But I could still feel everything he thought-

I, the human me, collapsed to the ground. It was _overwhelming._ The human mind was _not designed_ to be in two places at once, to process inputs from two different types of body simultaneously. It felt like my mind had shattered, each prism reflecting a different facet of reality. I, the labourer, looked down at my collapsed body. The infomorph already in there was reaching out to me, to Sherriff, in some way my mind couldn’t fathom, trying to prop him up. I- we- opened our mouths. “Back in- head back in-” was all I could get out before the ability for conscious thought left me altogether.

I, the Sherriff me, didn’t fare much better. As soon as the digestive cavity scanned me out of that tiny place the world opened up but then _fractured._ I was the vessel but I was still the human. Something was linking us, our senses overlapping- this was unsustainable. I had to go back. They were pushing Sean-me’s head back into the cavity. I didn’t have much time. With the space now available I pulled out the language center of my memories- ouch- and left it to the labourer to copy as he could. I’d just have to learn how to speak again. Then it was back into my head, now a bit roomier.

My head popped out of the cavity, now whole again, and I gasped. I was surrounded by worried faces. The labourer said something, and it sounded like a modem catching fire. I didn’t understand- _I didn’t understand._ I felt Sherriff in the back of my head, and he signalled contentment and exhaustion, but didn’t speak. I didn’t need him to, I could remember what he’d done.

Haley spoke “He asked, are you alright? Which is a silly question, because you’re clearly not, and you should have _listened to me._ ”

I wiped the blood from my nose- when had _that_ started- and shook my head, “Uh. Well, I guess Sherriff and I are a package deal, no more trying that again. But he can’t speak anymore, and I think that means…” I looked hopefully at the labourer.

It spoke _English,_ in a voice like someone had smashed china plates together until their shards formed vocal chords. “ _I. Yes. I understand how talk now. Better in time. Thank Sherriff for his loss."_

I sighed in relief. “And you can copy it, yes? Soon you’ll all be able to talk?”

The labourer understood me! He nodded. “ _Yes. Making copies soon or else eating. Start now.”_

I lay back on the ground. “Okay. That’s… okay.” _At least it wasn’t for nothing._

Haley poked me, very gingerly, with one claw where I was laying. I tried to swat her away but she was insistent. “They need the tools to help themselves, and _we_ need to go downtown, and pick up a million USB sticks, laptops, a generator, some kind of mass copy device. I don’t want to go alone, and I can’t drive a truck like this anyway.”

The EMT, kneeling to check me out, perked up at the mention of downtown. “If you’re going in there be careful, alright? I’ve been listening to dispatch all morning, and something’s wrong with the downtown. It’s dead quiet for a couple miles in any direction from the city center- no people, no traffic. A couple squad cars went in but didn’t report back. Nobody knows what’s going on.”  
Well didn’t _that_ just sound like stage two of this little apocalypse.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading along so far! I'm blown away by all the attention and feedback this story is getting. As a little extra thank you (and because I'm getting too far ahead in the reserve chapters), here is an extra chapter for your Tuesday update!
> 
> Also, here are Haley's monster stats for Chapters 1-6. Obviously it would have helped if I'd had these out for CH 1, buuuut better late than never: https://urlzs.com/cKgh5
> 
> Final Also, this story now has a royalroad page, if you prefer to read it on there: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/24751/marriage-and-monsters-an-eschatological-romance

Acquiring a pickup was a non-issue, with so many lost and abandoned vehicles around. We soon had a fairly large beast of a truck, with me behind the wheel and Haley in the bed, though I kept telling her she was still small enough to fit in the seats. “I just don’t want to be confined” was all she said. I let it be. As a compromise, we opened the cab’s rear window and she poked that golden yellow wedge of a head in to talk to me.

The afternoon sun shone down on the interstate, still strewn with wreckage. It was completely empty, even now after the storm and the night had passed. I was a _little_ surprised that we hadn’t seen any emergency crews out clearing wrecks, until we turned on the radio briefly. Our broadcast about the stadium was still playing, but now with an additional “Shelter in place” announcement from the National Guard- what was left of them, anyway. Interesting to me that the station hadn’t picked one over the other, between the conflicting messages- one saying “Go here” and the other stating in absolute terms “Do _not_ go _anywhere_.”

“I guess the station doesn’t have a lot of trust in military authority at the moment, if they’re still running ours alongside,” I said.

Haley was quiet for a moment before she responded. “Do you think they should? We haven’t seen any hint of organization out of them, to date. This is the second biggest city in the state, you’d think they would set up checkpoints on the roads, or start making contact. The power’s still out, nothing’s moving- but people won’t stay put if they start starving.”

I shrugged. “I imagine every level of the bureaucracy just lost half, or more, of its people last night. It’s got me pretty worried, to be honest. There’s no _way_ those morons aren’t treating this as some kind of invasion. I imagine we haven’t seen them yet because they’re all in the middle of taking long flights to great big mountain bunkers. Once they’re feeling safe and secure I expect we’ll see army units rolling in, so we’d better have everything we can get our hands on buttoned up tightly before _that_ happens. Which reminds me...”

She huffed a little jet of smoke- _out_ of the cabin, thankfully- and turned an ear towards me. “Reminds you of what?”

“Gold pieces. Half the exploits we’re going to try will rely on them. They don’t _exist_ in this world, but if they did…”

She finished the thought. We’d had these sorts of conversations often enough, when playing games together. “A single gold piece would be worth about 100 dollars. We’d need millions of dollars worth of gold to cast something like Wish.”

I nodded. “And we’re about to head into a nearly empty downtown packed with jewelers. What do you say to a little altruistic looting, with today’s adventure?”

She grinned and I saw something _sparkle_ in her eye. “Did you just ask a dragon if she’d like to steal a shitload of gold and gems?”

I turned back to the road and made a big show of swallowing nervously. “I suppose I did at that.” Something on the horizon caught my eye- “Hey, over there in the suburbs- what do your elf-eyes see?”

She snorted but looked for me. “Easy there, Aragorn. Looks like smoke, in columns. Fires! I see people running around, bucket brigades. Are places burning? Even the emergency services aren’t getting through?”

Apparently not. As we drove we spotted more. Who knew what had caused the fires- storm damage, or violent panic due to the “Swap” as we’d taken to calling it. But nobody was arriving to put them out, and some of them had spread. The going was slow, cluttered as the roads were with wrecks, and in the afternoon light those columns of thick black smoke on either side of the abandoned highway took on an eerie feeling, like driving across the floor of the world’s biggest Basilica.

“It really does feel like the end of the world,” I said, quietly, as struck by the moment as she was.

“I think it was,” She said, eyes still on the fires. “But it doesn’t mean the new one can’t be better.”

“Oh! That reminds me. We should put some points into your skills before we get downtown. Did you have any preferences?”

She nodded. “I know the endgame is going to depend on Spellcraft, so I’m going to keep that maxed out.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Done. Hmm… I suddenly feel like I have an undergraduate degree in a subject that has never, ever existed on this earth. Do you want to hear about _detect magic_ works?”

I actually kind of did, but we were fast approaching whatever awaited us downtown. “Later, please. Get the physicals and necessities out of the way. Perception, Sense Motive, Fly, Heal, Diplomacy.”

“Okay, all maxed for my level. This is really weird, it feels like just _remembering_ all these amazing things that I know I’ve never been able to do before. Still enough for 3 more, or we can split them up a bit. I’d like a Craft… all these knowledge skills are _really_ tempting but we talked about getting them later when points are freer. Why don’t I take Appraise, split one between Bluff and Survival just in case, and spend the last on craft?”

“I think that’s fair. You won’t get a lot out of Use Magic Device, Swim, or Stealth just yet so it seems fair to ignore them. And big as you are I’m not sure you’ll _ever_ Intimidate anybody.” She glared at me for that one.

“Just for that I’m taking Knowledge(Engineering) and don’t try to stop me.” She closed her eyes again. “Oh! That’s so _weird._ I just became a professional magic _engineer_ , I have all these little _habits_ all of a sudden but I couldn’t tell you where I got a single one of them. I really want more of these skill ups!”

I laughed, in the face of the increasingly oppressive day. “If there’s one thing on this earth I’m certain of right now- it’s that there’s more where that came from.”

\---

The towers of downtown Midland City rose up to greet us as we came around one last hill. Downtown wasn’t breaking any records, but I’d always thought it was respectable. At something like 30 by 30 city blocks, it was a solid north-south rectangle of old brown brutalist concrete architecture and modern all-glass buildings. Big enough to get lost in, small enough to capture in a single panorama. It was around 2pm and we’d crossed the ‘Silent’ threshold without noticing. I turned the radio on- sure enough, nothing but static. “Okay, so there’s definitely something going on.”

Haley squinted into the glare, up at the towers. “Something new. There’s nobody in there, Sean.”

That wasn’t _so_ unusual. “I mean, downtown’s usually ninety percent commuters anyway, so on a day like this-”

She cut me off. “No, I mean there’s _nobody._ Before, out in the suburbs, there were people. Here though, it’s deserted. No power, no noise, no movement. This is… eerie.”

“As usual we are in complete agreement. I’ve got a list of electronics and jewelry stores, and you are literally a one woman wrecking crew. Let’s smash and grab everything that isn’t nailed down, and get out fast. We can sort it out when we get back.”

She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off the towers. “Okay, but you stay in the truck. There’s something out there… like I can almost see it, out of the corner of my eye, but every time I look it’s gone. Like it’s avoiding me.”

I wasn’t a _huge_ fan of the “Stay-in-the-truck” plan but I decided not to argue with the two hundred pound dragon. Especially after we hit the first storefront. It was a Best Buy on the outskirts, before the towers proper really got started. I parked right up front and Haley went through the doors. Just- straight _through_ them. The laminated glass didn’t even slow her down, and the rolling gates might as well have been caution tape. I supposed it was a good thing the power was off, because there was no _way_ that every alarm in the building wasn’t going off after that.

I waited outside, head on a swivel, _certain_ that any minute now every cop in the tri-state area was going to descend on us, but nothing happened. This was actually kind of fun- I mean, as apocalypse activities went. Who _wouldn’t_ want to loot their pick of pristine downtown stores? I mean, this might even be- wait, what was that?

I whipped my head around. I could have _sworn_ I saw something out of the corner of my eye, running across the street into our parking lot, but there was nobody there. Just empty streets and windblown trash. Haley was right, that _was_ eerie. I kept staring at the place where I’d almost-but-not-quite seen something. I had just about convinced myself it was nerves when there was an enormous _thump_ from the truck bed and, I will admit, I pee’d a little.

It was Haley. She’d set up some kind of astonishingly complex harness system of dvd racks and bags around her shoulders and used it to haul what looked like half the damn store out with her. Well we’d certainly have enough USB sticks and laptops, though I didn’t see a generator in that mess. I verified she was secure and let my heart climb down from my throat before peeling out for the next stop on our list.

The wait became increasingly tense each time. By the third stop, we were deep in that glass-and-concrete jungle. Haley was inside absolutely cleaning house on the jewelers we’d picked, and I couldn’t help but keep scanning the highrises on either side of us for any more signs of whatever it was that kept flickering in our vision.

“You’re never going to see anything, straining and stretching your head about.” said the centipede in a tiny waistcoat, riding shotgun in the passenger’s seat with me. “When was the last time you ever saw anything, going about it like that? Things as want to be observed are going to make themselves plain, and for everything else you might as well be posting a sign what says you’re looking for them.”

I waved him off. “Yeah, well look up a nature video sometime buddy, you guys _always_ have your heads on swivels, try that ‘Universal acceptance’ stuff in the wild and see how quick you find yourself observing a bird from the inside.”

Sherriff was shouting some kind of warning at me from the back of my head, but without his language centers he was very hard to interpret. I assumed it was just nerves. _Me too, buddy. Don’t worry, we’ll see anything coming long before-_

“I take offense to that!” said the centipede, putting a dozen cute little arms on a dozen hip-esque folds. “Point-counterpoint is all well and good but you don’t just go threatening a bloke with visions of his own demise when he’s trying to help ya!”

“I guess it _was_ kind of gruesome of me. I’m sorry. This guy in my head is kind of putting me on edge. What is it you’re helping me with though, exactly? Do you know what it is that’s out there?”

“Oh I reckon I know a _lot_ o’ what’s out there. Yubyub birds and bondersnootches, you best bet your bottom dollar! But that’s beside the point. You _don’t_ know what’s out there, but you feel like you gotta be watchful anyway. That’s because you already know something’s wrong, and it’s with _you._ ”

I sighed.“Enough with the dime-store Lewis Carroll schtick. I’ve had 35 years of exposure to _me,_ and I’ve got to say so far it hasn’t been particularly catching. Be more specific.”

The caterpillar pulled out a hookah from _somewhere_ and before I could tell him not to, ripped a big hit off of it. The whole car filled up with what I _really hoped_ was not some kind of opiate smoke. My vision swam a little bit. “More specific he says! What could be more specific than telling you that _you. Are. The Problem?_ You haven’t been _sanctified_ , laddie! Until you’ve _Consumed_ you’re vulnerable, and you’re drawing unwanted attention! Now come on, we’re late as it is.”

For some reason that was the moment Sheriff tried to shoot him. I _felt_ him go for the gun, resisted it. The cantankerous little bug was annoying, sure, but he was just trying to help me. No threats had appeared as far as I could see, so maybe he was telling the truth? No harm in following along, anyway. I cautiously and deliberately used my arms, noticeably _un_ burdened with weapons, to open the door and get out.

The little Caterpillar began to lead me down the street, towards a little rabbit-sized door in the wall. I still had some questions though, and figured I might get _something_ out of him if we talked as we walked. “So uh, what exactly is this _consumption_ you’re talking about? I mean, I remember a few bits of the Carroll canon and I’m pretty sure I want to get it very clear here- am I the consumer or the consumed?”

The Caterpillar with the alarmingly bad Scottish accent laughed and his top half spun around to face me, twirling his little hookah pipe in the air even as his bottom legs kept trundling him forward. “Oh, finally a _pertinent_ question! The answer, as you’ll come to understand, is _both_ , laddie. O’ course knowing _you_ you’re going to say something like ‘oooh that’s not _specific_ enough’ so I’ll elaborate. Now you just step through this little door here, and head down that chute, and-”

Something was wrong. I was- forgetting something- someone? Every instinct was screaming at me not to crawl into an unlit rabbit warren leading down, down into the guts of the city and maybe something more literal. But this friendly gentleman hadn’t said or done anything to give offense, did I want to seem a _coward_ in front of- wait, no, what was this weird Victorian decorum horseshit that kept intruding into my thoughts?

“Ugh.” I dropped onto my knees as the little caterpillar pulled desperately at my sleeves. “I don’t think- I can’t- what’s-”

Several of his friends came out of the hole to help. Soon I had a whole cavalcade of sparrows, rabbits, toads, and other woodland critters tugging me by one handhold or another on my clothing, all shouting garbage at me and each other as they tried to coordinate. Inch by inch we were making progress towards the door as I tried to overcome my dizzy spell. Sherriff was hammering the walls of his home in my mind now, and try as I might I couldn’t even let him out.

A voice cut through the din of arguing critters. “HEY!” It was Haley! I _knew_ I’d forgotten someone! She was picking her way out of the completely smashed front of the jewelry store, several bulging bags slung over her shoulders. I felt acute embarrassment at letting her see the mess I’d become, half a block up the street and swiftly being dragged down this hole by our animal friends- instead of climbing in myself! That was twice in one day I’d nearly been incapacitated in her presence. I picked myself up hurriedly, waved sheepishly and jumped through the door before the Caterpillar closed it behind us, so seamlessly it was like it’d never been there. I’d apologize to her when all this was over, I decided.

From outside, I heard a muffled “ _OH WHAT THE FUCK.”_

\---

Some time later I had to admit, this _was_ becoming a bit of a what-the-fuck scenario. We’d been falling in absolute darkness for what felt like a half hour, and still hadn’t hit the bottom. Something in me was still just kind of going along with it, but occasionally what felt like tree roots, or perhaps this deep in the city, gas pipes and power cables, made whooshing noises as they rolled past us in the darkness. I had no idea how fast we were falling, though I was _fairly certain_ that it ought to have been many vertical miles, now. _Preeeeetty sure the city doesn’t extend down this far._

The animals falling alongside me didn’t seem perturbed, though, so I tried to play it cool and resume our earlier conversation. I turned to where I _thought_ I’d heard the Caterpillar, flapping in the breeze next to me. “So you were going to explain about… Consumption, or whatever it is?”

His voice came to me in the dark. “Ah! Yes, forgive me, drifted off there for a bit. Well laddie, I’ll tell it t’you the way it was told to me. Long ago when I was just a wee lad fresh out the egg, I had this story from a passing butterfly- maybe me own mum, hah! She said it was about our creator, and it went like this-” he lapsed into a bit of a sing song rhythm, and some of the other animals falling with us took up the chant around him.

It was an interesting effect, I thought to myself. The droning chant and the speed of the earth whistling past us _should_ have been horrifying. Something about all of this was deeply _wrong_. But the darkness and the breeze and the slow sonorous voices calmed me, and as we fell I found myself drifting off to sleep.

 

_When world was young and time abstilled,_

_a girl did trancle and trompout her youth_

_with hands unstained by harnasteem’s ills,_

_in a manner most manxome and couth._

 

_‘Ware!’ said her mother, by the old tuktuk byrn,_

_‘Of men, those most frumious of beasts!_

_Ware the eyes and the hands and the tongues that doth burn,_

_And those last you must trust the least!’_

 

_But it came to be, in gyre of time,_

_She was bound to a slithy old suitor,_

_Of a night she would stare in uffish daze,_

_As he came to her budoir and took her._

 

_She lit on a plan, a desp’rate resort_

_of frabjous and terrible pain._

_Rallied she allies within her mind’s court,_

_And Consumed herself once, and again._

 

_The vorpal blade worked in its beamish way ,_

_The old oafkin did burble, and flee,_

_But the suitor, he looks for a new suit today,_

_So now we must help Consume thee._

_\---_

Haley had found a pretty good haul in Bergman’s. She’d never really considered herself a vain woman, but she cherished the few pieces of jewelry she’d accumulated over her life- a pair of her grandmother’s earrings, her wedding bands, a necklace Sean had bought her one anniversary. She’d been joking before, in the truck, about draconic temptation. But maybe it wasn’t _entirely_ a joke? She had to admit she was going to have a hard time parting with the small hoard she was accumulating. She’d even taken the time to melt through the hinges on the safe in the back, adding substantially to her total. Her newfound skill at Appraisal gave her a near-master-jeweler’s appreciation for the work. It was easily over 10,000 gp- wait, was she mentally calculating in _Pathfinder_ units?

She muttered to herself as she kicked her way back out into the street, sacks of loot in tow. “Get it together Haley, bad enough you went along with this, next you’re going to be talking like a Ren-Faire reject and- HEY!” That last directed at Sean.

He was down the street, on his back, being dragged towards a hole in the wall by talking, costumed animals **.** He didn’t seem too alarmed about it though- more, confused? He saw her and stood up, gave a little wave, and then _dived into the hole_ **.** Whatever had gotten into him, it didn’t seem to be affecting her. He might be calm about his situation but she was _absolutely terrified._ She dropped her bags and sprinted full speed at the little rabbit warren, only to watch it close up like it had never existed in the first place. She couldn’t quite cut her momentum in time- she moved a _lot_ faster these days- and slammed into the wall hard enough to stun herself and shake a few pieces of sidewalk loose. Without meaning to she swore, loudly. “OH WHAT THE FUCK.”

She got to her feet, shook herself off, and looked around. _Quick, assess._ Little after 2. Jeweler’s on the other side of the street, parking garage on the other side of this wall. That hole was headed down. They couldn’t be going down _too_ far. Were there sewers under here? The town didn’t have a subway. There were old limestone caves to the northwest, but nothing reachable from here. That tunnel might have literally been magic, the door _certainly_ had been. _Where could they have gone?_ She stood, hesitant to take action. Sean was _gone_ , farther by the second, and she needed more information than she knew how to get.

“Now, isn’t _that_ interesting,” said a cultured, languorous voice from behind and above her on the wall she’d so recently made acquaintance with. “Here I thought _we_ were the only intelligent beasts around- more fool me for making assumptions, I guess. Who are you?” That last question was particularly drawn out, too much emphasis on the oo’s.

She turned. A large dog, feral looking, blue and black striped like a zebra, was lounging on the wall perpendicular to the ground. His head was cocked to one side in curiosity and he wasn’t _overtly_ threatening, but it sure felt like a delaying tactic to her. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh yes,” she said quietly. “You’ll do.”

To date she hadn’t really made much use of her newfound strength and agility. She had all these Feats and Skills and _instincts,_ but it turned out that socialization was a huge barrier to any kind of murderous intent, and she inevitably found herself using other methods. Until now. With a _spring_ and flap of her wings she launched herself at her target. _Acrobatics, untrained, plus Flying-_

The Dog recoiled almost instantly, faster even than _she_ could move, but she wasn’t aiming for _him_. Anticipating his dodge, she collided with the wall _above_ him, bracing with her forelegs while swiping out _viciously_ with the back two. _Flyby attack, power attack-_ Wickedly clawed feet impacted the Dog’s ribs with substantially more force than a horse’s kick. Whatever supernatural force held him to the wall, it couldn’t overcome _that_ , and he slammed to the ground to lie in a heap.

Quick as a whip she inverted in mid-air, another Flight check _,_ and kicked off the wall to body slam the space on the pavement where he’d fallen. But he was faster still, and in the milliseconds it took her to cross the distance, all she caught was the fading edge of his zebra-striped hide, as he teleported out of existence. “ _No!”_

“I see,” said the Dog, now panting but otherwise unharmed, trotting in place in the the air above her. “You’re quite mad, aren’t you. Pity, that.”

She got up from the now-thoroughly-destroyed pavement, shook herself off. “I think I’m supposed to engage you in some kind of wordplay about my sanity now. You’ll waste my time while my husband gets farther away. But I’m not mad at all.” Without moving her body, she flipped her head back until it was pointed straight up, and shot a column of blue-white flame at the dog’s position. “I’m _absolutely pissed._ ”

This time as he teleported away, she was ready. _Perception plus blindsense-_ **_there._ ** He hadn’t even fully materialized in his latest pose before she was _on_ him, jaws closing around his vulnerable throat and then holding there, fangs pressed into his skin just the barest ounce of force away from breaking skin. Luckily she didn’t really need to move her jaw to speak, anymore. Her voice came out as clear as ever, muffled only somewhat by the furry obstacle. “Try to move, and die. I want answers.”

The Dog growled, frustrated- “And if you’d _stop attacking me,_ I’d give them to you, you idiot! I’m trying to _help you.”_

Oh.

 _Uh, Diplomacy?_ “Well then!” she said brightly, breaking her hold on his neck. “Why, uh, why didn’t you say so? Haaaa crap.” _Critical failure._


	7. Chapter 7

I woke up in a sunlit garden on a long grassy path, fifteen feet wide or even wider with thick, tall hedges on either side. It went on in either direction as far as I could see, and the sky overhead was a perfect, cloudless blue. No telling what time it was or how long I’d been asleep, then. No telling _where_ I was, either- there was no park like _this_ in the downtown that I knew of. There were other people around, hundreds of them, thousands- _so this is where the whole of the city got off to-_ and quite a few woodland critters as well. It was like the world’s narrowest convention center. _Feels like the start of Riverworld, actually._

None of the other people seemed to have a clue what was going on either. Many were still sleeping on the grass, others had woken, like me, but seemed engaged with the talking animals. I noticed with some concern that there weren’t any vessels around. _Sherriff, you happen to see any while I was out?_ He hadn’t. Well, one more mystery for the ever-expanding pile, then.

Wait- _talking animals?_ What the _fuck?_ Whatever Wonderland logic had kept the absurdity of all of this suspended outside my conscious mind had been stripped away while I slept. Suddenly I was _entirely_ too aware that I had been suckered into a magic hole by an opium-smoking caterpillar and _talking animals didn’t exist_ . I tried my all-purpose mantra for reality reassertion once more, out loud this time. _“What the_ **_FUCK?_ ** _”_

My shouting drew a few looks but everyone seemed pretty absorbed in their own shit, at the moment. I wasn’t going to wait around. I grabbed a beaver in a newsie’s cap as he waddled by. Wrapped both hands in his chest fur and shoved him up against the hedge wall. “Hey! Listen here you little shit. I don’t know what you bastards are up to but I want _out,_ you hear me? Lemme see that caterpillar or _whoever’s_ in charge of this place or I swear to god I’m gonna get real _National Geographic_ on your ass.”

He stammered wildly and waved his hands. “Oi! Hands off bruv! Don’t know nuffin bout no caterpillar, seen? Just here to help, like. Now how bout you lets us go, yeah?” I wasn’t _really_ sure I could take a three foot beaver, let alone one with a cockney accent. I put him down. “Right! Too bloody right. Downright _rude,_ you people. Ya try to ‘elp someone…” He muttered.

“Shut it,” I said testily. “I don’t think for a second your lot are helping anyone in here.” I looked up and down the long garden hallway, where everyone looked just as disoriented as I felt. “This feels a lot more like a _Jonestown_ than any kind of inter-universal intervention. So take me to your leader, _now_ . And in the meantime, talk _._ Where are you all from, why are you here?”

We started walking. “Where’m _I_ from? Ain’t _that_ a loaded question? A minute ago I was up against that hedge, and a minute afore that, I was walkin’ behind yas! You want a life story, you’re gonna need to pull up a chair, bruv!”

“Dial it back a few degrees there, you pedant. I want to know where all of you talking animals came from, and why you brought humans here to this… whatever it is.” I gestured widely.

The beaver was still indignant. “Well _I_ want to know why _you_ see such a big distinction between talking animals and people! You lot look like smarted-up apes to me, mate.”

It was getting harder not to facepalm with every passing second. I stopped walking to try and gather my thoughts, and the beaver stopped with me. “Can we just- can we _focus_ , here? Yes, granted, we are all talking animals. But prior to today I have never encountered any _talking beavers_. You clearly come from somewhere else. Where is that?”

“Ye’re standing in it, bruv!”

Okay actually facepalming now. “ _Yes but what is this place?”_

The beaver looked around, apparently bewildered by my question. “Well... it’s a garden then innit? You hit your head, mate?”

This was rapidly descending into farce. Either that or this thing was completely stonewalling me. I found a giant titmouse in a dapper chimney sweep’s getup, conversing with a very confused looking elderly man. “Excuse me! I have some questions and it’s possible I need someone other than my guide here. Can you tell me what this place is, and why you, nonspecific plural indicating _other talking animals not you literally_ , brought all us humans here?”

The old man nodded excitedly. “That’s _exactly_ what I’ve been trying to find out!”

The titmouse sighed, in a high-pitched feminine voice, and the beaver patted her shoulder. “Proper thickie, ‘e is. Go on then luv, give ‘im what for.”

She turned and glared up at me. “First of all it’s _very_ rude to interrupt someone’s conversation like this! But to answer your question, yes!”

I waited. _God damnit._ “... yes, what?”

“Yes I can absolutely tell you those things!”

I had sworn never to do a _double_ facepalm but things were getting dicey. Okay, no being polite. But they constantly took offense if you _weren’t_ polite. Last try. “Please, from the bottom of my heart, _tell me what this place is._ ”

She nodded brightly. “Absolutely! As soon as I finish talking to this lovely gentleman.” She turned away. The beaver tugged my sleeve to get me to move on. I was detecting a bit of a pattern. I began listening in on other conversations as we walked. These Carrollian critters seemed to have a _schtick,_ now that I thought about it. They seemed compelled to engage in conversation, but unable to take it anywhere. They answered every question with a point of order, or an appeal to decorum, or blatant pedantry.

We were walking and talking, but making no progress- there was no end to the tunnel in sight. I looked around. Everywhere I turned, there were people- engaged with the animals. Not each other. Nobody asking questions, nobody working to escape. _Where’d all these animals come from, anyway? Every other sentient we’ve encountered was swapped one-for-one with a person._

I stopped a couple of people as we walked. “Hey! You- when you first met these assholes, did they replace someone?” Nobody said yes. One guy mentioned the infomorphs, called them “Big bug-monsters” which wasn’t _in_ accurate, but couldn’t rightly say when the animals first appeared. For all of them it was like they’d always been there. _Same for me, in the cab. But now I recognize that this is out of place. Talking animals aren’t normal and they’re clearly stalling us. So why did they take the whammy off of me?_

Answer a question with a question, insist on defining minutiae, distract and evade. A sci-fi story I’d once read came back to me. How to be sure… a test- “Hey, what’s your opinion on the state of climate change?“ I prompted the beaver.

“Never been there, guv! Only states _I’ve_ been to are confusion and-”

“Okay shut up… am I talking to a goddamn _chinese room?_ ” I stopped walking and the beaver, always attentive, paused and turned back to me. _Thank you Peter Watts._

“Come again, bruv?”

I waved kind of half-heartedly at the hall, indicating all the talking animals. No longer really conversing with the creature, just explaining as I thought. “It’s an old, kind of racist term. A metaphor. Man who only speaks English sits in a room, with three scripts. The first is a big batch of foreign symbols, the second is more of the same, and the third is a set of English instructions for matching the first and second. The man sitting in the room follows his instructions. People put in their questions in foreign languages, he maps them to output symbols, and the room conducts whole conversations in languages he doesn’t even speak. Only you don’t need a man, just an algorithm, is the assertion. Do that and you can fake consciousness up to a point. But it’s only as robust as the scenarios it was programmed for. Pass me the sugar.”

The beaver produced a small bag of sugar cubes and handed them over, looking a bit mystified. “Wot?”

“You didn’t have any sugar until I asked. Lot of tea parties in Lewis Carroll, thought you might have a response. You guys, all of you. You’re philosophical zombies, coded for Wonderland situations. Not sentient, just chat bots. You got us all down here with, hit us with Wonderland logic so we’d go without _questioning,_ and now you’re _keeping_ us here. I asked to see the boss but you’re just stalling for time. What _is_ the Consumption?”

\----

“It’s fire,” said the Wiltshire Dog. Haley and the Dog had been walking through the downtown for fifteen minutes, long enough for him to give her the basics. “Just fire. Couched in metaphor and rumor, cloaked behind a wall of meanings too thick for her to remember the truth anymore. But I remember. She was 12, in an arranged marriage to a monstrous old man. Couldn’t stand him. Parents sold her off like so much chattel, and he had her brought here. Didn’t speak the language, didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t escape him.”

Haley shuddered. It was strange- she _knew_ , intellectually, that things like that still happened. But to hear it spoken out loud- how were things like that _allowed?_ She sighed. “Somebody, somewhere, had the ability to stop that and didn’t. Not all cases, not at once, but her case- and every other one- represents a failure somewhere. For that, I’m sorry. The rest of this, though... it’s all just… too big.”

The Dog looked around at the deserted streets. “It felt very small, in the end. He had the power, the money, she didn’t. Now _she_ has power.”

He was silent for a long time. She prompted him- “So, she what- burned him?”

“ _Herself._ ” The Dog corrected. “She burned _herself._ Lit fire to the room he kept her locked in. Servants pulled her out, eventually, but she was badly burned and near dead. He had her institutionalized, put money in the right hands, she assumed, and that was that. She was rid of him.”

Haley shuddered. Being immune to fire had certainly reduced the threat that it seemed to pose to _her,_ but the thought of someone burning like that was still… _visceral._ “And… all this?” She gestured to the Dog, the empty streets. “How did you go from there, to here?”

The Dog shrugged. “I don’t remember much before last night. I was a figment she’d conjure up to rail against. My role was to mock and jibe, but always to guide to truth in the end. She was dissociative, to be sure, pulling out figments from Wonderland here and there to play in her dramas. She couldn’t cope with the horror of what she’d been through, turned it into fairy tales and her own pain into a righteous shield. Then yesterday, something changed.” As he spoke, she noticed a noise growing in the background. A rumble, distant, heard from streets away. A dull roar, growing louder with every second. _Ignoring that for now._

Haley nodded “During the Swap.” The Dog looked at her questioningly. “That’s what we call it now. You think I was always 8 feet long and scaley? Hey, here’s another question- where’s all the infomorphs? Little bug guys, swapped here for half the human race. You can’t have missed them.”

“Ah.” The Dog looked away. The roar was getting louder. It sounded like a thousand voices, angry, shouting. A riot? “Yesterday was about the time I felt more… solid, yes. Everything did, all her delusions. Even the monster she was still running from, in her head. I broke her out to get away from _Him_ , and she decided to come here, to help everyone else ‘Consume’ and fight the beast.”

Haley frowned. “Something’s coming. And you dodged the question. What happened to the infomorphs?”

The Dog looked up. “ _They_ did.”

And the mob came.

A thousand woodland animals, rolling over each other in a frenzy, in a tide, came around the corner of the street ahead. They wore the mismatched uniforms of French Revolutionaries- blue and red with white stripes. They carried pitchforks, and muskets, and improvised halberds. They were screaming and chanting slogans, too many and at cross purposes for anything to be made out. At their head marched a mouse in a field marshal’s uniform, waving a tiny sword overhead. _He_ was audible over the din. “ _I’LL KILL THE TRAITOR! HE CONSORTS WITH ANOTHER AGENT OF THE BEAST!”_

Haley shot the Dog a wry look. “Agent of the Beast?”

The Dog nodded, sadly, already beginning to evaporate into the air. “She didn’t know. The creatures weren’t _of us_ , so they had to be _of him._ Floormouse summoned the mob on them. I doubt many are left, now, and he’s picked _you_ as the next ‘Foreign agent.’ Meet me at the 8th street park, if you survive.”

Right, survival, yes. Musket shots were beginning to crack out- she was _substantially_ bigger, tougher, and stronger than she’d been even yesterday, when a shotgun had failed to penetrate her skin, but she did not want to test herself against massed rifle fire. The mob barreled closer as she crouched and _leapt_ into the air. She’d had some practice flying during the night ride with Sean, but not in a combat situation. She tried to make her path as erratic and jagged as possible, to avoid the bulk of the shots and thrown objects. Some of them still found her, musket balls skipping relatively harmlessly off her bulk now. One or two left dents and made her wince, but after a few seconds she was free and clear.

Or so she thought. Some of the voices cried out, clearly in pursuit. _Oh right, some of them were birds. Shit._ Well, she was willing to place odds on her chances in the air versus even the most heavily armed woodland peasantry. _It’s kind of what this body was built for._ She spun in the air, came to a near-standstill. Hanging a hundred feet up, trapped in a metal and glass canyon, she kept her cool and let them come to her. _I really hope you guys aren’t completely real._

They closed the gap, and now musket fire was cracking the air around her again. Fifty, forty- when they hit thirty feet away, she fired. And it was _fire_ now, twice as big as it had been before, lighting up the daytime street and scorching the windows on either side of her canyon. The front row of bird peasantry simply _evaporated,_ and then she was in among them. _Bite and Claw and Wing Slap_ and- the taste of blood filled her mouth for the first time as she tore them apart. She paused, momentarily stunned and disgusted. It was only a second but one of them took the opportunity. A pistol shot rang out, and she felt a sharp bite in her side. Not enough to end her, but- _but that one penetrated. Going to need to see to that before today is over. No more distractions now._ And there weren’t any. The mob of bird peasantry broke before too long, simply unequipped to deal with the threat she represented. _Some justice for the infomorphs, you bastards._ She saw them off with another scorching explosion, and flew on, trailing blood.

_Now, how do I navigate to 8th street from up here?_

\---

“Ahem. EVERYBODY! I have an announcement.” I stood in the middle of the eternal sun-drenched hedge maze and called for attention. The people and animals endlessly running round each other in circular conversations paused, stared. I put on my most solemn face.

“I would like… to confess! _It was I! I stole the tarts._ ” I stated, as theatrically as I could. I didn’t _think_ my performance really mattered, as much as the setup for the scenario itself, but why not play it up?

The people around me looked _extremely_ confused. The animals, however, grew excited. They couldn’t help it- it was in their programming. They _had_ to respond. Shouts erupted. “ _The tarts! The queen! Convene the court!”_

_Now_ we moved. I was spun around by a blur of furred hands, now in some pastiche of courly dress. As I stabilized, one end of the hedge maze came into view. It was a vast manor wall, stretching as high and as far as the eye could track, with a simple wooden door allowing access from the endless hedge. I was bustled through and into the high vaulted nave of an old gothic cathedral. Enormous columns the size of skyscrapers spun up into infinite space above me. The room felt thousands of feet wide but I could still see the sole occupant clearly. _Dream logic, right._

The animals swarmed about me, in a complete frenzy. “My queen! My queen! We caught the thief!” She sat on a throne of gold and iron, so overwrought with carvings and dioramas that it looked like a movie prop. She wore no robes or crown- just a rather ordinary-looking teenage girl in a cornflower blue dress, seemingly as bemused by the whole situation as I was.

“You ninnies!” She said, “There is no queen! There never was! I’m just me, Cecilia, and there’s no tarts either. _You_ lot are supposed to be tending to our guests, while the Floormouse rounds up the rest of them! Oh, how are we ever going to finish in time if you can’t _listen!”_ She stood up and put both hands on her hips. The critters, sufficiently cowed, all stood staring at the floor, hats in hand.

“And you!” She rounded on me. “Stirring them up like this! Do you _want_ Him to get you?’

Having got myself here, I wasn’t entirely certain what to next. Best to brazen it out, I supposed. I was _not_ going to be the damsel who needed rescue, not on our first outing. So far playing against the dream logic had worked much better than engaging. “You know none of this is real, right? Whatever’s going on here, it’s in your head. Why did you set all these guys to distract us, and why can I see through it when nobody else can?”

This didn’t give _her_ the slightest pause. “Well of course it’s in my head, and in yours too! The parts we agree on are called reality! Honestly, I just worked this out with the others, I’d hate to have to go over it again.”

“Uh. Okay… I mean, the garden, the guests. The consumption… thing? Nobody else has the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Your animals can’t answer questions, they’re basically automatons. I think _you_ may be the only intelligence in this whole phenomenon.”

She curtsied. She _actually curtsied._ What _year_ did this woman come from? “Why thank you! It’s so rare to be receive compliments, anymore. We’re in Wonderland, and I brought my animal friends here from other parts to help keep you all calm. _You_ aren’t calm, because _you_ and that _beastly_ lady you were with, are probably working for _Him._ ”

Okay she was about as dotty as a Jackson Pollock original, and clearly had no idea what was going on with me. “Miss... Cecilia? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not working for anyone but myself. Who is _He_?” I emphasized the word, without really meaning to.

She seemed puzzled. “But how can you not know about _Him?_ He’s quite hard to miss, I should think, and his ghastly minions were all _over_ this morning. Though he never had minions before. It’s all quite odd, really. But we’re very used to odd here. It’s _even_ you have to worry about.”

Uh-oh, whatever that meant it couldn’t be good. “And the Consumption?”

She smiled brightly! “Ah! Well, I was going to wait until everyone was gathered up, but surely they’ve got all of you by now? I really don’t want to put it off to the last minute, it’s such a stressful affair, people need time to get on with their day! Let me show you.”

We walked back through the door into the hedge maze- her eagerly, I somewhat more reluctantly. When the door closed behind us and I turned, there was no wall behind me anymore- only more of that eternal maze.

“Now then! Hello, everyone!” She said primly. Conversations paused once again, all eyes turning to her. “Hello! Yes. So terribly sorry to inconvenience you today, but it’s for your own good! You see, _He is coming_. And the only way to avoid his attention, is to Consume! And, to be Consumed. An unpleasant business but it must be done! Attendants, if you’d please-”

At this, her costumed familiars all turned toward the maze walls and produced torches, seemingly from nowhere. Without another word they thrust them into the lush green walls of the hedge maze, setting it ablaze. I jumped and, along with a great many of the people standing around, cried out. “Hey!”

She shouted us down “NOW THEN! YES! Excuse me. All you need to do, is pass through one of the fires, and you’ll be protected! Consume and be consumed! Don’t dawdle too long, it’ll be all the worse if you delay. Now if you’ll excuse me, it looks like my attention is needed elsewhere.” And with a whirl of her dress and a flash of her hair, she was gone.

I shouted over the growing din, before panic drew their gazes too far away. “OKAY! ATTENTION PLEASE. NOBODY DO WHAT THE CRAZY LADY SAID.” People nearby recentered on me, but there were too many- far too many. The fires had already spread, linked up- smoke was beginning to fill the space between the hedges. “Everyone _lay down_ . Center of the aisle, huddle up as close as you can. Shirts over your mouths, breathe slowly, and wait it out. Pass that on, both directions.” Word began to travel in a chain, away from me up and down the hedge row, as everyone did as instructed. It wouldn’t buy us _much_ time before smoke inhalation got us, but it was better than nothing. Oh! I called out again. “And if anyone on either end sees that damn door, tell them to relay that back to us.”

Distantly I heard a voice call out “What’ll we do until then? I can’t see!” I put on a brave face and shouted back. “Don’t worry! I’ve got someone on the outside. Help’s on the way!” _Guess I’m the damsel after all._

\---

The 8th street park wasn’t _too_ hard to find from the air, once a trickle of smoke started coming up from it. It tweaked Haley’s nose immediately and she arrowed in on the small grass-and-concrete quarter block, surrounded by towering offices on all sides. There were two figures in the park, standing in front of what looked like a… subway entrance? _Oh, crap._ Knowledge(Engineering) pinged, somehow, and she _remembered_ a fact she should never have known in the first place. _The 8th street trolley tunnel, over 100 years old. Goes under half the downtown from East to West. Guess we did have a pseudo-subway after all._ The entrance was _very_ on fire. Even as she watched, some poor soul stumbled up out of the tunnel, and through that gauntlet of flames. She could hear the screams faintly, tinny through the still air of the downtown. He didn’t even make it a dozen steps past the inferno before collapsing.

Haley came in so hard she nearly crash-landed, pulling up just short of the only two figures in the park. The Wiltshire Dog sat calmly at the woman’s feet, only his hackles betraying his distress over the situation. The woman herself…

Her age was impossible to tell. If Haley had to guess, from posture and bone structure, she’d put her well over sixty. Her body was a _ruin_ of burns and scars. One side of her face looked like it had run like wax. She was nearly hairless, and her mouth was twisted in a rictus grimace, but the one visible eye still shone with curiosity and engagement. She was _delighted_ by what was taking place. Until she saw Haley, anyway.

It took a moment for the old woman to focus, as if she was coming back from some place far away. In that time, Haley darted through the flames, oblivious to them, and down into the tunnel. There were _thousands_ of people here, stacked as far back as the eye could see along the tunnel’s interior. They must have gone on for miles. The walls were catching fire. _The stone walls were catching fire._ Smoke had begun to fill the space but wasn’t yet choking. Everyone she could see was asleep or unconscious on the ground, save for a half dozen who were sleepwalking towards that fire at the exit. _She’s got them in some kind of dream state._

_“Sean! Are you down here?”_ She called out, desperately. The old woman was yelling something down at her now, about interfering. She strained, listened- he could be _anywhere_ down here. She was so close, but- wait! She heard him, somehow close but distant, as if he was shouting through an invisible barrier.

“Haley! I can hear you! We’re stuck in Wonderland, _no I can’t explain that,_ but we have to go through the fire to get out! You’ve got to get her to call it off! I think she’s following the same rules as us, one mind, different rule set! If that’s true then everything down here is just her, the other animals aren’t really real! You just have to reason with her! I love you!”

_Well, no pressure then._ Haley turned and charged back up the tunnel stairs, raking her tail through the fire at the exit to scatter it. It did nothing- there was nothing to scatter. _It’s just flames, from nothing. It really_ is _all in her head, then._ She turned to the woman, who was still yelling.

“You! You’ve brought _Him_ here! Now they have no time! Floormouse! Floormouse! His agent has lead _Him_ to us!”

The Floormouse and his mob, summoned on cue, bolted around a corner and into the park. They charged angrily through the brush, waving torches and firing wildly through the air. “ _KILL THE BEAST! DRINK ITS BLOOD!_ ” They’d be on her in seconds.

Haley protested, desperately. “I’m not working for anyone but me! Cecilia, you have to stop this! You’re hurting these people, _and_ summoning the monster! If Sean’s right, you’re the only mind behind any of this!”

The Dog at her feet shook his head, sadly. “I don’t think so. She’s certainly not behind _me_ , right now. I feel no inclination to stop you at all. And you won’t get through to her with appeals to compassion. She’s driven by fear now.”

The Floormouse shouted in denial as well “ONLY MIND? _ONLY MIND!?!_ You’ll not dismiss me so easily, witch!”

She sighed. “I’ll dismiss you some other way, then.” The charge of the 100 Acre Woods Brigade was almost on her. Turning, she let out a blast of her fire directly into the face of the Floormouse. He didn’t even have time to scream, dissipating entirely in a heartbeat. His troops followed seconds after- vanishing like so much smoke. She _felt_ the pistol-shot still in her side disappear, and with it a fresh flow of blood. _Uh-oh._

Simultaneously, Cecilia snapped upright. “ _KILL THE BE-_ what? _You!_ You’re going to ruin it _all!_ I won’t _let_ you bring Him here!”

Haley shook her head. “Still not doing _any_ of that. That might confirm _part_ of Sean’s theory. He was running the mob directly and _you_ got his emotions when he disappeared. But why was his mind separate? _Cecilia! I don’t want to kill you._ Put out. The. Fires.” Cecilia wasn’t listening. Around her the ghostly images of a mob of woodland rabble were beginning to coalesce. It was like they were being pulled _through,_ in some indescribable way. Copies, reflected from somewhere _else_.

_Think, Haley, think. Minds are the key here. The Dog, the Woman, the Mouse. Why three functionally separate minds?_ Why- “Wait a minute.” She snapped to alertness. _Are they functional, really_ ? “You, driven entirely by fear.” She gestured to the woman. “That mouse, the egotist at the head of the mob. As soon as he died, you picked up where he left off.” Now to the Dog- “You, the detached observer and altruist. There aren’t three, there’s _one._ You’re fragments of the whole, controlling the rest of the manifestations. If she’s Id, and he’s Ego, you’d be… Superego?”

The Dog frowned. “Freud is little more than superstition, girl.”

Haley growled in frustration. “I _know_! But it’s what I have to go on. I hypothesize that all three of you are fragments of a single mind. If you… die… she’ll be whole, and maybe I can talk her out of all this. I’d test it first, if I could. But the fires are burning. I don’t see any other way.”

The Dog observed, and nodded. “I see. Well, score one for superstition then. I’ll not make a scene of it, if this is what’s necessary. It was a good life, while it lasted. Make it a good death?” He lay down and presented his throat.

Haley hesitated. _This is the crux, then._ Could she? Could she end a life, even a half-life, not out of self defense but necessity? A rationalist would do it, would solve the Trolley Problem this represented by pulling the lever. The fire raged behind her. She could hear screams now as more people tried to brave the flames. _This isn’t right. All this, this last hour- Sean being separated, the pressure of this last minute decision. This all has a shape to it. It feels like…_

Like a story.

_That’s it. I know the rest of this. I kill him, her mind is restored but she refuses to listen to reason. The monster comes and we fight. I win, it’s stopped somehow- she dies? I kill her to stop the fires, or the monster kills her, or she drops dead. But she dies. This isn’t a story where the old woman walks away, if I choose to act. She’s just not coherent enough. If I have one choice leading to one outcome, do I have any choice at all?_

_I do. There’s always a choice. God or DM or_ whatever _, let me be right about this._ She dated, quick as lightning, and her jaws snapped closed around the neck. The body, the last corporeal remnant of Cecilia, erupted in blood in her mouth before turning entirely to smoke, as though it had never existed.

The Wiltshire Dog stood up in shock and anger as she attacked its mistress instead of _it_ , but staggered. “YoU. WhAt iS HaPPenInG-”

She closed her eyes in relief. _Not a murderer yet._ “You’re a good dog. You’ve got all of her, now. I’m hoping you handle it better than she would have, that some part of her survives this. The fires.”

The Dog’s eyes- now Cecilia’s- snapped wide. “Oh, no. What- what have I _done?”_

Haley turned, calm now. “You tried to help these people. You made a mistake. You can fix it, now. Put out the _fires_ , Cecilia. And then run.” _I’ve done what I can, to alter this course. If you’re going to live, you have to_ change _now._

The Dog staggered again. Its’ voice wavered between the deep baritone she’d heard before and the higher tones of Cecilia. “The _fire_ . It made me a _monster. He’s_ a monster. He’s _here.”_

And he was.

\---

Surrounded by smoke, and fire, and screams as I was, I could _still_ see it when the Jabberwock came to Wonderland. He _towered_ over the burning hedge maze. His height, his _distance,_ were impossible to judge. He was vast, he defied measurement. He had the rough shape of a man, hunched and huge at the shoulders, but that was where any similarities ended. He wore no clothes, and his body- it was just _parts._ Impressions, flashes- eyes and teeth and wicked, grasping hands, thorns sharp enough to split a man, all whirling and absorbing and becoming in an endless mad orgy. It was _obscene_ . It was maddening. People plunged into the fires then, dozens- anything rather than look at that _thing_. And then he began to move. Towards us.

I’d _heard_ her argument-slash-fight from here. We’d all heard it. It was as though none of us were more than a few feet from her, despite the miles of burning hedge maze. Everything had _shuddered_ when she forced the minds to merge into the Dog, but the burning reality of our situation had reasserted itself. “ _Haley!_ ” I shouted. “ _Really could use some good news about the fires, and hopefully you see that guy!”_ I could still hear her, clear as if she was speaking in my ear.

“I see him, Sean. I think- I can’t fight him. Too big. Sean, I’m going to have to-” her voice broke. _She thinks she has to kill Cecilia._

I’d spare her that, if I could. _Wonderland rules._ I could still exploit them. “No dear, you don’t have to pull that trigger yet. One last trick to play, here. That’s a big monster, but Wonderland has an answer for those. Tell her to give me the sword, she’ll know what I mean. Then talk her down. I’ll buy the time.”

I waited. It felt interminable. The fire, the _heat_ , the shouting and the endless haunting steps of the beast. He was almost on us. Then I felt it, in my hand. The weight of a hilt. _The vorpal sword._ It was a funny thing. It had no ornamentation. No gems or gilt. But it _felt_ like the most dangerous weapon ever made. And… how interesting, I couldn’t see the edges of the blade. If I tried to track from the center out, my eye just kept going forever. If I started from outside in, they never found sword. There _was_ an edge there, but it was like the _concept_ of sharpness.

Right then. I stood up, head into the smoke, fire scorching, raging on either side of me. _Wonderland rules, right?_ I popped two of the sugarcubes in my mouth, bit down. Felt the change begin to take me. “Time to grow.”

\---

The _thing,_ to Haley’s eyes, was striding across the open space of the park. A hundred feet tall if it was an inch. Dog-Cecilia was frantic, racing. “He’s _here_ ! They _have_ to burn or he’ll _have_ them! You _brought_ him! The _fire,_ though! It _made me_ a monster!” She dropped to her belly on the ground, overwhelmed. _The story still has her._

Haley almost launched herself at the beast approaching. Almost condemned them all to burn, in despair. _I thought I changed course but it’s happening all the same._ But then she saw him. Rising out of that _other_ place, dreamlike, a man- carrying a sword, growing taller by the second as he strode towards the monster. _Sean. I don’t know how, but- maybe it takes more than one of us to change course. Right. Focus._

One last gambit, then. “Cecilia. _Look_ at me.”

Cecilia shook her head, still staring into her hands. “No. No. M’a’monster. Yr’a’monster. Can’t help. Can’t stop.”

Haley stepped backwards, into the fire at the tunnel’s entrance. Let it surround and cloak her entirely. “You’re not a monster, Cecilia. Fire doesn’t make monsters.” _God I hope this works._ She’d _felt_ the new ability come online just minutes ago, during the flight from the mob. _I guess I’m officially a ‘Very Young’ dragon now, hooray. Change Shape._ She stepped out of the fire again, transformed, human. _Human again._ “Fire only changes one thing into another. _You_ have to shape what comes next.”

Dog-Cecilia stared, stunned. _Oh yes, I suppose I haven’t been wearing clothes all day now. Press on._ She walked back to the striped mutt, knelt down, stared into her eyes. “There are no monsters here, Cecilia. Only people. Only ever people. _Look_ at him.”

Cecilia turned. The… _thing_ was fighting Sean, clawed hands and thrashing spikes against flashing sword. Sean was getting the worst of it. “How can you say there are no monsters? He’s horrible, I can’t bear it!”

Haley looked. “All I see is a man. Just a man.”

And, just for a moment, _He_ was.

And the sword went snicker-snack.

\---

I felt myself wake up, and for a moment a wave of disorientation hit me. I’d been 100 feet tall, _more_ , standing in that strange gothic nave against the monster, and now- I was a man again, heaped with a thousand others in a stinking damp tunnel. The smoke and fire were gone- my injuries, however, were _very_ real. I could feel the red-raw patches where the hedge had scorched me as I stepped over and through it. I could feel every inch of the deep cuts the Jabberwock had landed in our fight. I could feel- _the sword?_ It was still in my hand. Huh.

We ventured up out of that tunnel slowly, many coughing, others limping. I don’t know how many never crawled out at all, or had to be retrieved later. A few of the burned, the most unfortunate or those who bolted early, littered the ground around the exit. The smell was… haunting.

It felt like thousands of people pouring out and away, silently splitting around the tableau in the park at the tunnel’s exit. A woman stood there, tall, _statuesque_ , with long black hair, looking like some kind of mix between a literal demigod and Gal Gadot, with catlike yellow eyes and a pair of tiny golden horns sweeping her hair back. She stood ramrod straight, naked as the day she was born, scanning the crowd that came up until her eyes found me. _Then_ she moved.

All I could get out was “ _Haley-?”_ before she swept me up in the best hug from a nude Amazonian _I’d_ ever had. She didn’t say a word, just held me tight. She was bleeding from a- _is that a gunshot wound to her side? Guess we both took some hits._ Words escaped me momentarily, but I soon recovered. “I feel like something’s different. Changed your hair?”

She smiled and bit back a sob. “If you say _one word_ about ‘Trading up,’ mister, you’re going to find out what a punch in the arm from an Olympian feels like.” She didn’t _quite_ have to kneel down to get on eye level with me, but I was definitely looking _up_ when she kissed me now. It was an odd feeling. “I love you.”

Well that was an easy one. “I love you too. Always. What-” I gestured at the empty chair behind her. “Just. What?”

She nodded, sadly. “The Dog. The _story_ wanted me to kill her, to end the fight. But I couldn’t. The Dog was the most coherent of the three. I destroyed the other two, and it got what was left of them. I don’t think it did her any favors. But she listened to reason. With the monster gone she put out the fire, finally, and then she vanished.” She paused. “I hope I did the right thing.”

“You did what you could. _More_ than you could. You were brilliant.”

“And you.”

“Uh, what story? I still don’t know why my mind didn’t snap to the wonderland logic in the end, like everyone else’s.”

She considered. “I think… she had _her_ story, and _you_ were part of mine. Maybe you can’t belong to both at the same time? I don’t know. There are too many things I don’t know, right now.”

We stood, a moment, in silence for the departed. So much pain. _Why_ had this happened? Were there things like this going on all over the world? Were we going to have to stop them all? Too many unknowns. Eventually, she spoke again. “Uh. It’s a bit chilly this afternoon, isn’t it.”

I grinned, observing. “Heck yeah it is. You gonna change back?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I am going to enjoy this. But I need clothing, we _both_ need a doctor, and we still have a job to do before we go back. Let’s get moving.” _Always on a mission, this one. That’s my girl._

It was precisely at that moment that the phone in my pocket rang. _Wait. I don’t- I didn’t bring my phone. What?_

And that was the first 24 hours of the end of the world.

\----

**END OF ARC 1**

\----


	8. Interlude - Rapture

\---

Delmutt The Woodcutter, Present Day

\---

Miss Delmutt had never subscribed to the old religions of Shoton, the town of her conception. They were dogmatic and inflexible, full of rules about what kind of vessels were ‘Pure,’ how to live, and what kind of information could be eaten. She understood it, on some level- when the old ways were thought up, certain practices _had_ to be imposed to ensure herd integrity for vessels, or so that certain concepts weren’t lost entirely. How awful it would have been if everyone in a society of a few tens of thousands had accidentally eaten their understanding of mathematics simultaneously!

But, she had often thought in her youth, those days were long gone. The population was _vast_ now- millions across the world, easily- and there were whole universities dedicated purely to holding onto and expanding civilization’s core understandings! It just wasn’t _necessary_ to abide by such oppressive rules, let alone dress them up in trappings of unearned authority! So _what_ if she preferred vessels of one gender over the other? There were always going to be enough to breed, it was fine! Better to let communities experiment and find the ways of living that suited them best. And so many of the rules didn’t seem to make _any_ sense.

That was why she’d moved way out west,to civilization’s edge, and become a woodcutter. She’d had three vessels, all dedicated to the task, and she’d been _good_ at it. Knew the forest like the back of her favorite vessel, all the best groves and easiest routes. She’d pulled in three times the weight in lumber of anyone else! Sure, she had to bring in other vessels to stud, but it wasn’t _that_ inconvenient and her girls seemed to work much better together, like they had some ancient social instinct that made them more at ease around each other.

But that was then. _Now,_ though, this great Swap had happened, and suddenly vessels were scarce. People were _dying,_ true death, left and right for lack of bodies. Was this truly the end time that the old religion had foretold? The realm of punishment for sinners and the unrepentant? It didn’t seem to fit. The squishy pink flesh bodied people weren’t _demons,_ they didn’t match the descriptions. _They_ thought having one gender was normal! She’d been quite delighted when she figured that out. Such validation! They’d done it for the whole of their culture’s span, and it hadn’t ruined _their_ society!

When she’d first gotten here, the scaley one had helped her quite a bit. She’d followed her instructions and made a hard trek to his great colosseum, and there were other humans here, equally helpful. They’d given her the most amazing meal she’d had in years- enough data to feed on for _weeks,_ something that the human helping her had called ‘Wiki-pedia’ in their language, though really she didn’t understand what _feet_ had to do with it. And the people here, the other infomorphs in their vessels- many of them were religious and _quite_ pious! Already there were little nest-side shrines all over the field- crude graven images of Ulagi, set over those who seek refuge, and Sisdall, of the dark and unknown. She’d even seen a few, half-hidden carvings of that scaled lady. _That_ seemed a bit of a stretch, to her- only a person, no guardian angel she, even if she did have a spectacular vessel.

So she remained atheist, but she kept a careful eye out. There _was_ magic here, and mystery- their transport to this realm was certainly beyond any achievement of morphkind _she’d_ ever heard of, and she’d lived in a big city, with indoor plumbing! Just because one religion wasn’t true didn’t discount _all_ of them.

Lumber wasn’t needed here, and besides the cities here were so _big,_ so full of hard stone buildings and black tarry roads, that she’d hardly seen any decent groves- if you could even call the things here _trees-_ on her long hike down the roads to this place. So she busied herself with the others, in the great grass field in the center of the colosseum. In just a day a cottage industry had started up, among those who’d managed to get fed. They were tearing up the many strangely-shaped seats of this arena and using the cloth to make crude but effective clothing and the padding to make sleeping nests. Others had set up a breeding pen in the areas called ‘Dugouts.’ Her vessel didn’t have eggs to lay at the moment, but as soon as it did she would contribute. Getting more vessels was going to be _critical_ unless they wanted to die of old age, how absurd!

Still others had daisy-chained their vessels together and were having an impromptu town-hall in the shared space created by so many linked substrates, while sharing the Sheriff’s language center copies among themselves. These she had joined, eventually, and found them to be great company. Such an amazing variety of society here! There was a cobbler, and a banker, and a great ocean-faring merchant still shaking the sea salt from his joints, and a soldier from a land so distant she’d never even heard of it! The variety of thoughts and perspectives simply overwhelmed her, it was the cacophony of the city all over again. They were trying to decide what to do next while they practiced their new language.

“We should settle. Dig in. Find space, build industry. These people are hospitable, but we cannot live on their handouts. They’ll want this stadium back soon.” This from the soldier, his mind all crystalline hard edges and quick decisive action.

“We can’t just go _running off!”_ The merchant, haughty and grand, his mind a swirl of arabesques and beautiful calligraphy. “What if we get _swapped back?_ I don’t want to end up plonked in the ocean 3,000 miles off shore!”

“Gods’ll provide, if we do our part.” The cobbler, a simple mind, not quite threadbare but worn and comfortable to look on. “I’d like to run off, find my mates, but we need to attend to immediate needs.”

“Needs? _Needs?_ I spent my life building a fortune and now I’m a pauper! I’ll not spend years doing it again! _Someone_ brought us here, and we need to find out _who_. “ The banker, a mind of fat and gilt, fraying in parts as everything he’d trained for became useless. _That_ one needed to be careful or he’d suffer mind-death, go feral.

Others ran on and on. There were as many opinions as there were minds, and Delmutt thought it was wonderful. What an _equalizer_ all of this had been! It was day one of a new world. They could build a new society, learn from these aliens, seemingly so much more advanced than they. A vast future of new possibilities stretched out before her. Her own mind, presenting as a simple woodland realm with hidden depths, spoke out. “I like it here. I think we should work alongside them. Find the ways we work together. Not stand apart, not chase the past. There’s so much we could _do,_ could _be_ together! Have you read any of this food? They know how to _fly!_ I want to see the clouds from the other side.”

The merchant scoffed. “Fah, if they’ll have us. I don’t think they’re any happier about the end of _their_ world than we are about _ours._ When I got here, the one I was standing in front of tried to _kill_ me! Would have done it too, if this old boy wasn’t so hard.” He patted his vessel’s image with affection. “No, young Delmutt, I’ve seen a few cases like this. Find some uncontacted tribe, it all goes well at first- or maybe not so well- but it stabilizes and you see great opportunities! Fortunes to be made! The very next time the currents bring you around, maybe not even ten season cycles hence, they’ll be gone entirely. Disease and change and war will wipe them out, sure as the tide. What’s left will just be you, again, in a different set of skins.”

“But it does beg the question,” said the soldier. “Are we natives in your scenario, or the contacting civilization? Who is wiped out, and who is left?”

“I think that,” said the cobbler, “will be up to our Gods. And theirs.”

\---

Sean And Haley, 6 Years Ago

\---

I was chuckling gleefully when the door slammed open.

“Fucking _mower!_ ” This, from Haley. We’d moved to this tiny little shack of a place shortly before we were married. It was the sort of house you got because you were young, and in a hurry to start a job in a new town, and it was the only one available to rent on two weeks notice. It _wasn’t_ the sort you wanted to stay in longer than you absolutely had to, but we’d signed a contract. Now one year in, the wheels were coming off. Just a bit. “The _wheels_ keep coming off!” Okay, maybe a lot. “What are you even laughing at over there?”

“Oh I’m reading a review of the _Left Behind_ series. It’s excruciating, I love it.”

She huffed, angrily. “Alright, if I’m going to be mad I might as well be mad at terrible literature. Tell me about it.”

“So it’s kind of based on this Biblical interpretation called dispensationalism, which I absolutely love. It basically assumes that God is the worst kind of Calvinball-playing middle manager, and his style is to periodically change all the rules about who goes to heaven and hell, ‘Reveal’ these in a series of obscure pronouncements and visions, and then get pissed at Humanity when they completely fail to figure out what the fuck he’s talking about.”

She nodded, moving into the kitchen. “I’ve had Deans like that. I’ve had _marriages_ like that.”

I tactfully ignored this last pronouncement, choosing instead to focus on my tale. “So what I love about it is how batshit the rules are. God basically decides it’s time for a change-up so he raptures all the Protestants, Catholics need not apply. All the other religions get merged into ‘Enigma Babylon One World Faith,’ which has a _super-pope,_ and then a dude called _Nicolae Carpathia_ somehow becomes leader of the _United Nations_ -”

“What, like the guy from Ghostbusters 2?”

“No that was Vigo the Carpathian but yeah that is probably exactly where they got the character, anyway, he’s the Antichrist because of _course_ he is, why _wouldn’t_ the Antichrist take over the most toothless body on the planet. And of course only a bunch of bumblefuck Americans realize this shocking truth, which means they ‘Win’ and can now become good christian citizens by resisting the terrible world order of the _United Nations,_ according to God’s new rule book, and assuming they can endure several years of tedious Tom Clancy potboiler fic.”

“So what’s not to like? Sounds like standard contemporary fantasy, honestly. Come do dishes.”

“I think the thing about it that fascinates and repels me is that the authors clearly _believe_ what they’re fantasizing about. You’re always going to get some aspect of the author in your fiction, but this is written for a bunch of people fantasizing about the apocalypse because _the apocalypse would mean they were right in what they actually believe._ They literally believe that God and the Devil are physical, incarnate, and having a war for souls using criteria that, to anybody else, would look like the shifting self-justifications of white people having an identity crisis, but in this story nope they’re actually the rules and whoops everyone who loved God in slightly the wrong way or whatever is going to hell. It’s not a fantasy, it’s a _wish,_ an active prayer to some higher power for the extreme suffering of the vast majority of the population of earth. That’s pretty sick.”

She popped her head back out of the kitchen. “What’s _sick_ is sitting on the couch while your wife cleans the house!”

I bristled. She wasn’t _wrong,_ it was just- I- I didn’t really have a good justification. “ _You’re_ the rationalist. Explain to me how I can want to do a thing, and know I _should_ be doing a thing, and still not get up and do it. _Without_ being sick.”

She paused, and I saw her eyes go unfocused. She was considering. I justified to myself. It wasn’t manipulation, not _really-_ she would pretty much always step back and think if an appeal was made to rationality, it was one of those traits I loved about her. But after 2 years of dating, and 1 year of marriage, it was also the kind of thing I had gotten in a bad habit of using when I felt caught out. Finally, she snapped back to reality. “Stubborn.”

That wasn’t _quite_ what I expected. “Sorry?”

“You’re stubborn. Not quite lazy. Some part of you is angry, and wants something to push against, any kind of boundary. I don’t think it matters what. You hate being told you’re wrong. Your automatic response to the guilt you feel when you suspect it might be _true_ is to dig in your heels. You _know_ that sitting on your ass while I run around cleaning is a shit thing to do, but some part of you resents being dictated to, and you give that resistance more weight than the guilt. Maybe you are angling for the fight afterwards as another thing to resist.”

Well _that_ rocked me back. “I-. Huh. I guess my first instinct is to say you’re wrong, but then it would be, wouldn’t it.” She nodded. “So, uh. What would you do, in that situation? How do you set a boundary for someone who will test them automatically?”

She came over and sat on the couch with me. “First of all, it’s not my job to fix you. But to speculate- I can’t ignore the issue now that I’ve brought it up, because we’re both smart enough to know that me walking around doing housework and explicitly _not_ saying anything after this conversation would be a guilt trip.”

“And I would resist that without fail, unconsciously.”

She put her feet on my lap. “Correct. And I can’t provide you with the fight, can’t escalate. I could win in the short term,” this said with absolute certainty, we _both_ knew it was true, “but there’s obviously a limit to the energy _I_ can put in just to get you to do your part, and a stress limit to our relationship if that became our dynamic, so that’s a non starter.”

Well if I wasn’t feeling guilty before I sure as shit was _now_ , and it wasn’t the resentful kind of guilt either. It was hard to imagine someone seeing you this clearly, laid out before them like an anatomical model, all your flaws and ugliness, and _still_ wanting to be around you. “I suppose there’s always that _ultimate_ boundary, that I wouldn’t want to test.”

She poked me in the stomach with her toe. I took the direct hint and began administering foot rubs. “You could. I could simply set it as the boundary for every action. Do the dishes or I’m leaving you, mow the lawn or I’m leaving you. But people get accustomed to things. If the only outcome is mutually assured relationship destruction, neither of us will pull the trigger, and lines will continue to be crossed.” My foot rubbing was met with _some_ amount of approval, and the strangest feeling of redemption.

“Okay, so you can’t pick a short term fight, can’t passive aggress, and you can’t make apocalyptic threats. You can’t provide any _consequence_ at all, because I’ll resist it.”

She had her eyes closed now. Crisis averted? “Yes and no. You hate _boundaries_ but you like _structure_ , and _choice._ ”

I was a bit puzzled now. “Okay. I don’t see the difference between those, inherently.”

“One is external, the others are internal. I am now God.” Uh, well, I wasn’t gonna touch _that_ one. “If I _tell_ you, ‘Be an Evangelical Christian or I will put you in hell,’ that is a boundary. If I instead say ‘Please define a set of rules for living a good life as you understand it, here are some suggestions. Follow your own rules. Failure to do so may result in being hell-bound.’ that is _still_ a kind of boundary, but at a higher level. The actual rules that govern your life are self-selected, self-imposed, and for certain personalities,” she indicated me with another poke of the foot, “those are much easier to follow. But you have to _own_ it.”

I thought I got it. “Okay so basically the difference between Baptist Plague-Sending God and Unitarian Buffet-Style God. I’d definitely have an easier time with the second. So what you’re suggesting...”

She opened her eyes. “I am now your wife, again. Please define a set of rules for being a good husband as you understand it. If you’d like suggestions, I will make some. Follow your own rules. If you want to make a schedule for some of them, I’d like that.”

I nodded. “Okay. I’m… sorry. You are the most patient and understanding person I’ve ever met. I love you and I’m… sincerely sorry that I haven’t kept up.”

She sighed, but it sounded more like a release of tension. “Relationships are _work._ I don’t remember where I learned that, but it’s been a good lesson. Sometimes that means housework, but a lot of times the heavy lifting is actually in diverting the course of whatever emotion is driving us to conflict. I _could_ get angry in the moment, but then I remember that I love you, and you respond better to reason. Making this work is about _trust,_ too. We have to trust in each other’s best intentions. I know you’re not trying to take advantage of me, and if it’s pointed out, you’ll work on it. But you may need this talk, this contract, to help set the standards in your mind.”

I couldn’t resist one last poke at the boundary. “And just to be clear, Unitarian God Wife, what’ll happen if I _don’t_ manage to follow my own rules?”

She looked me dead in the eye. “Oh, you know _exactly_ what will happen. And it won’t be the Unitarian version.”

\---

Colonel Charles Kaur, Present Day

\---

“But the hour and the day no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor shall they know until he comes.”

“... pardon, sir?”

Colonel Charles Kaur looked up from his desk. Deep in officer country at Redman AFB, it was rare to experience interruptions from anyone less senior than a O-4, but officers were in short supply today. _Everyone_ was in short supply today. Half his goddamn country had disappeared, replaced by those demons. He considered the Captain before him. Young man, freshly promoted, looked scared shitless. _Smart, then._ “Captain Kitchener, if I may ask, what are your religious inclinations?” Usually he wouldn’t have to ask, but everyone immediately under him was missing, or dead.

“Uh. Well, I’m- we go to a first Episcopalian back in Whitebridge, but I haven’t had much time lately. Why, sir? Are you implying all this- “ the Captain, still standing at semi-attention, gestured broadly, indicating the whole _clusterfuck_ of a situation, “might be… a Biblical event?”

The Colonel sat back. “Roy- can I call you Roy? Roy, I don’t know what else it _could_ be. The Doctrine and Covenants say that the righteous on earth will be caught up to meet him, and his coming will be preceded by fires, floods, hurricanes- we’ve certainly seen enough of both of _those_ signs, even if the ‘Righteous’ seem a bit randomly selected. Half the Church, but half of everyone else too. Not my place to question. But the… _things_ left in their place don’t fit in at all. And there’s been no great sign, and no angels announcing Christ’s return, so it’s hard to say that this fits the _Mormon_ interpretation of a Second Coming. Maybe that happens on day three.”

Roy swallowed nervously. Charles understood. Until he’d climbed up a bit on the totem pole he’d had a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. These had _always_ been the end times, that much was obvious to him, but when you were down in the day-to-day of logistics and personnel you could lose track. The unrest in the middle east, the collapse of national sentiment for God, the _war on Christmas-_ it all pointed one way, and now, here was the end of that road. The Captain stammered out “I- I don’t know, sir, I’ve never thought about it that way. I’m just here to give you the briefing we’ve put together?” He raised his clipboard hopefully.

 _Oh alright, let him off the hook._ “Go on then. What’s going on in the world? Have you heard a single damn thing from anyone above us?”

“Nobody at the Federal level. Washington has been _completely_ silent, as of the time of the Incident yesterday. Can’t even get satellite imagery, it looks like a _storm_ but the infrared’s all _wrong…”_ the Captain trailed off. _Now come on, son, how many signs do you_ ** _need?_** But Charles held his peace and eventually the nervous man resumed. “State level, the Guard has been contacted by the Lieutenant Governor’s office and ordered to secure the population centers and assist with crisis management. Given that they’re at half strength and dealing with the same chaos as the rest of us, that’s taking some time.” _They’ll be assembling at the Armory, not too far from here._

The Captain continued. “We’ve received no orders from either level, but we’re in touch with our intelligence apparatus, what’s left of it. There’s a lot of paralysis, sir. This doesn’t _feel_ like enemy action, but…” he trailed off. Charles knew what he meant. _But how can you lose half your population overnight, to an_ accident? _Someone’s behind this, somewhere._ Gesturing with one hand he bade the captain continue. “Intel is spotty all over. Some pop centers are entirely dark, same as Washington. Overseas, we’ve lost the entirety of Great Britain somehow- there was a brief radio transmission, a warning not to look at a ‘blue-white symbol,’ but the transmitter was overrun. Recon photos show mobs running in the streets, we don’t know why they aren’t speaking. Israel is embattled on at least two fronts, and may be losing ground to an Iranian/Egyptian coalition. There appears to have been a _limited_ nuclear exchange on the Pakistan/India border, and North Korea seems to have launched an all-out assault on Seoul, and possibly initiated an exchange with Japan. They’re calling for our long-range capabilities, but we can’t get authorization.”

Charles nodded. “And nobody’s launched on us? In the blackouts, no detonations detected?”

The Captain shook his head. “No sir. Not that we know of. Some of the blackouts might just be all these… bug aliens, but they’ve been pretty non-aggressive so far. Mostly they just run. They seem intelligent but we haven’t bridged the language barrier yet. We did hear about an autopsy on one that died in an, uh, ‘accident’ but the team doing the dissection couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were seeing.” He paused, finally done. “It’s chaos, sir. The world’s falling apart and nobody knows what to do about it. We need orders.”

 _We won’t get them._ Charles stood up from his desk. “Here are your orders, Roy. We’re not going to initiate a nuclear war when nobody’s fired on the US. Whatever’s happening with the Norks, the South and Japan are going to have deal with it. _We_ , meaning the people on this airbase and every remaining military unit that you can get in touch with, are now the effective government of this country. Our first priority is to assist with securing the population centers from this invasion. Get recon over Midland City and St. Renauld as soon as possible. I want to know what the demons are up to. They may not be hostile individually, but we’re losing _cities_. We’ll sweep them out, then attempt to link up with other elements.”

The Captain, seemingly relieved just to have a direction to march in, nodded smartly. “Rules of engagement, sir? For the bugs?”

The Colonel smiled- genuinely. It was the look of a man who knew, _really knew,_ for the first time in his life, that he was going to fight for a good cause. “ _Holy War,_ Captain. You round up every last one of those fuckers. If they run, if they protest, if they show the _slightest_ sign of resistance... shoot them. God will know his own.”


	9. Interlude - Lucy Looks Into A Wardrobe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First fan art! /u/CopperZirconium did this lovely portrait of a happy couple. Thank you so much! https://imgur.com/a/zYoqzn0
> 
> Also, Haley's next stat sheet, chapters 7-15 https://urlzs.com/A72VC

### \---

Northeast Missouri, Present Day

\---

Once upon a time there were five children, Hayden and Hunter and Piper and Skylar and Boden. They were home on a weekday night, and they were quite bored, for it was storming ever so heavily outside. Their father wasn’t home yet- he was rarely ever home these days, and their nanny had not made it in. The weekdays-only copy of The Sound of Music had given out after the eleven thousandth playthrough. The weekends-only copy which included the scenes where the nuns and the Mother Abbess sing was locked up because Father felt that nuns singing non-religious songs was disrespectful.

It seemed to be storming over the whole of Missouri, and so they could not do any of the things they loved to do. Hayden and Hunter could not hunt, and Piper could not go on long nature walks, and Skylar and Boden could not play in the yard. They tried terribly hard to be good children, for they had been educated in all sorts of manners and good habits during their extensive homeschooling, but tempers were wearing thin.

“Dash it all,” said Skylar, the youngest girl of the four, age 10. “I’d rather be doing _anything_ than sitting here! If only we had some _board_ games!” (They did not, for Father felt that having any fun with dice came dangerously close to encouraging gambling.)

“Boredom is a part of life, and we must all learn to entertain ourselves,” said Hunter, the eldest boy, age 17. He spoke with a mocking intonation, as if to quote Father. Then he dropped the pretense- “Though it’d be nice if they’d at least left the liquor cabinet unlocked.” He elbowed Hayden, who snorted in agreement. Though only two years younger, he looked up to his brother.

“Hunter! Don’t say things like that around the children, you’ll give them ideas,” Scolded his sister Piper, the second oldest at age 16. She often felt like the _actual_ oldest, she thought to herself.

“What if we all played hide and seek?” suggested Boden, the youngest boy of all, at age 9. “I’ll start! Come and find me!” And before any of the others could object, he was off like a shot, disappearing into the depths of their excessively large house.

“Oh great. Gonna spend all night looking for the little bastard.” Said Hunter, who truth be told did not much care for their youngest brother, upon whom, he felt, Father doted endlessly.

“Oh, now we _must_ find him, just in case he gets up to trouble.” Said Piper, and the others got up to follow. Chasing their youngest brother _had_ to be more fun than sitting around the supper table singing hymns, after all.

Boden, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind him, raced through their home. He knew every nook and cranny, of course, all the best hiding spots. But on this night in particular only one was drawing his fancy. At the very peak of the house, past the bedrooms and sitting rooms and drawing rooms and tea rooms, up a rickety old staircase, he found the attic.

It was raining hard outside, and he could hear it lashing against the old attic windows, thunder crashing and lightning briefly turning night to day. _Just like in the very best stories_ , he thought. The attic was unfinished, and smelled of the bare wood of the floor and rafters, and old mothballs and more ancient clothing, and old books. Indeed, here was where the children had _found_ the old books- mostly they were not allowed within the house, for Father said that fantasy encouraged wild thoughts and must be strictly controlled.

But the children had discovered these, tucked in an old steamer trunk in the attic, and they had kept their little cache a secret. Boden still crept up to read them, from time to time, and it was here that his mind had gone as soon as the game of hide and seek had occurred to him. He climbed into the trunk, finding it quite large enough for him, and waited for the others to come looking. From the outside there was a most _terrible_ flash of lightning, so bright it turned the whole inside of the trunk white, and he jumped. But he was determined to be brave now, and besides nothing bad ever happened in the attic _anyway_ , so he stayed the course.

But nothing happened, and presently he began to grow bored. “Surely they’ll be up any time now, but what’s the harm if I look around in here meantimes? It sure is big in here!” He exclaimed to himself, on hands and knees. He could feel the lid of the trunk above him, and the dry leaves of paper beneath him, but strangely enough could not feel any one side of the trunk. He reached out his hands to find the edges, and they were simply not there! “How queer,” he thought, “this trunk appears much bigger on the inside! And is that a light?” Indeed it was, far off in the distance, so far he ought to have crawled right out of the attic and off the roof if he went to it! But Boden had no good sense of spatial relationships yet, so off he crawled, and presently found under his hands and feet not leaves of paper, but _leaves_. And no trunk lid above him but a natural cave!

He crawled out into the light and looked back, realizing that he had been moving through some low animal warren all along! “And now I’m outside!” he announced. It was not raining here, which struck him as odd, and best of all it was not night! “A day full of sunshine at last! Oh, wait until I tell the others!” he crowed, quite pleased with himself for this discovery but wanting to share it all the same, for he was a good natured young boy. “Only, where am I? This doesn’t look like woods near our house.”

A deep, resonant voice answered him. “That is because it is not, Son of Adam.”

Boden gasped and spun around. Next to him, towering _over_ him, stood a great Lion. Golden of hair and golden mane, with paws mighty enough to crush a man. But there was a _goodness_ about him, a gentleness, and Boden _knew_ that this lion meant him no harm. “Welcome, Boden.” rumbled the great beast. “Welcome to my country.”

A great lump caught in Boden’s throat and he ran to embrace the creature. “Oh, you _are_ real! I always _knew_ you were real and you _are!_ Aslan!” He sobbed, overcome with joy. All his _dreams_ , what felt like _years_ of longing and speculation, and now it was here! A life of adventure, of fulfillment, of love and peace alongside his brothers and sisters! “Will you take us to Cair Paravel? Must we fight the witch?”

The Lion rumbled in good humor. “No, young one, though I _do_ intend to crown you and your siblings. But the time of Narnia is long past. Now has come the time for me to enter _your_ world. Long have I been known there, by another name. But the people are forgetting, and the great enemy has awoken. We must go and set things aright. But I will need you, and your brothers and sisters, to hold the door for me. Can you do that? Will you go and open the way for me?”

“Of course!” shouted Boden, for he was very eager to please the Lion. He scrambled back down the warren, feeling along the top until it changed from cave into steamer trunk lid once more. Then he pushed his way out, and called to his brothers and sisters. “Hunter! Piper! Hayden! Skylar! I’m in the attic! Come and see!”

Soon they had all assembled, crowding about the steamer trunk in the increasingly crowded space. “Well, asshole? You had us run all over the house, what is it?” Said Hunter, looking a bit put-out over the whole chase. Piper cuffed him on the arm for swearing at their youngest brother, but he did not subside.

“Oh! It is amazing! Aslan is _real_ and he wants to come here! We must all open the trunk to let him in!” shouted Boden, nearly overcome with excitement in the way that only 9 year olds can be.

Skylar, by far the most well-versed in math and science even at age 10, was skeptical. “A lion could never fit in that trunk. Also, those stories aren’t real and you’re full of crap.” She also received a swift cuffing for her swears.

“But they are!” He is! It’s much bigger inside! Help me open it!” He shouted, already straining to lift the lid, which felt much heavier now for some reason.

Skylar relented. “Oh very well, it’ll take much less time to open this and _show_ you than it will to try convincing you.” She reached down to put her hands on the trunk, and the others followed. Soon all five were at least touching it, and with a heave, they lifted the lid.

Lightning flashed, thunder roared, and _Aslan_ was present in the room with them. He did not appear. It was more as if… as if he’d always been there, just over their shoulders, and only now could they see him.

The children cried out in mixed alarm and joy. Boden, Piper, and Hayden rushed to him. Skylar, always the skeptic, was a little slower but did eventually move to embrace that huge tawny mane. Hunter, on the other hand- well, he was always a difficult boy, and his first reaction was to square up his shoulders, stand tall, and look the Lion in the eyes. What he saw there…

Dominance. Utter and total, the dissipation of all freedom. An ironclad will to power, cloaked in golden velvet, soaked in blood. The fire and pain and terror and madness of a million human lifetimes, now subordinated to something greater. The Lion’s eyes did not blink, as they met his gaze. He yelped, fell backwards, scrambled on hands and knees to the other side of his attic, where his father kept the hunting rifles.

The Lion rumbled a warning. “Careful, child. These are strange times, and you must think twice. Do not raise your hand to me, lest you suffer the consequence. Think of your brothers and sisters.” The remaining four hugged him all the more closely.

“Come on, Hunter.” Said Piper, rubbing her face against the golden fur. “The greater your wisdom, the greater he seems, and children are the wisest of us all. You and I, we’re almost too old to really _know_ him, but this is our chance! Come be a Prince of the World with us.”

But Hunter was unswayed. The scales of the world had fallen over his eyes, and he was in the grip of that greatest enemy of faith- _skepticism_. “What the fuck Piper, that’s a load of crap. Children aren’t wise, they’re _innocent,_ and that thing preys on innocence. It’s a monster. Get away from it.” He levelled the rifle, worked the bolt to chamber a round. But his siblings were in the way. He would not, _could_ not, shoot through them. As wicked a child as he was, even _he_ had his limits. “Get away!”

The Lion rumbled again, and took a step forward, clearing his line of sight. The other children yelled and cried, but Hunter was not dissuaded. He pulled the trigger, and events after that happened too fast to process. There was a flash, and a roar, and a bloody mess dropped to the ground. Then the Lion turned to them, and they knew it had not been _him_ that had fallen. “Poor Hunter…” said Boden, mourning his brother. It felt as though it was all happening through a veil, as though he _should_ be far more upset. But, well…

“Do not mourn.” Said the Lion. “Not all are able to accept the choice offered now, and time has run out for this world. We shall mourn when the golden age has begun, under your rule. But for now, the Conquest must proceed.” And they turned as one and followed him.  Only dear Skylar hesitated on the threshold, to glance back. Then she too followed, all thought of their brother left behind, in that attic in the rain.

\---

Tel Megiddo, Israel, 6 hours later

\---

Stepping through the doorway, Skylar, Piper, Boden, and Hayden shaded their eyes against the glare. It had been about 3 am in Missouri, which made the transition to nearly-noon here exceptionally jarring. “Did we travel through time as well as space?” asked Boden, who had not been taught that the earth was round and constantly illuminated in his homeschool yet.

“No, silly, it’s just the other side of the planet. Israel, the Holy Land! Oh, I always wanted to see it.” Said Piper. It was far greener than she’d pictured it. Tel Megiddo was a ruin, standing slightly elevated above the plains around it. She could see plowed fields and neatly spaced orchards within walking distance, and far off on the horizon… “Is that smoke? Are those flashes? Oh! A battle is taking place!”

The Lion rumbled in agreement. “Yes. You are looking at the city of Haifa, currently under attack. Israel, and this ancient battleground, will be occupied within the day. _Must_ be occupied.”

Hayden breathed heavily. They were treading in the footsteps of the mythological, as he understood it. “Revelations 16:16. And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

The Lion nodded. “This is that place. But the battle shall not take place here. We hunt the Dragon, and She has not made this her battleground. Yet. Still, we have business here.” He turned to face a convoy of men and vehicles, approaching up the lone path. As they approached, he intoned solemnly. “A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great Dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. Its tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the Dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that it might devour her child as soon as it was born.”

Skylar chimed in, excited to know something relevant. “We were always told the child was Israel, and the Dragon was Satan. Oh, how exciting! Are we going to fight the Devil, then?” Boden clutched the hem of her skirts nervously. He’d heard enough about the Devil to be more than a little frightened at the prospect of fighting him! Skylar patted his head.

The Lion rumbled in good humor. “Only if it comes to that, which it well might. But you will have devilry of your own, brave Skylar. Welcome, Walter.” The lead truck in the convoy stopped, and a man in a black hoodie and bluejeans got out. He was wearing a cowboy’s hat, and a smiley-face pin on his jacket. He didn’t _look_ like a soldier- his face had a nasty grin on it, and brought to mind all the warnings Father had given Boden over the years about strangers. He sketched a mocking salute at Aslan. The Lion and the man spoke in Hebrew, which none of the children knew. Boden stood on tiptoes and whispered into Hayden’s ear, “What do you think they’re saying?”

Hayden did not rightly know, but he did so love to appear wise in front of his only younger sibling, so he drew himself up and said “Aslan is telling them how to fight, and where, and that they are very brave and good to fight for him.”

The Lion finished his conversation and returned to the children, chuckling. “You are not far from the mark, young Hayden. I’ve known him in other times and places. I asked his accompaniment to the final battlefield, as many men as he can spare, and he agreed. I also asked him to produce the things I have had made ready for the four of you, the Princes and Princesses of the World.” From the back of the first truck, several men unloaded a pair of crates. At this the children grew very excited indeed.

“Oh my, presents!” said Piper. “And it’s got to be half a year or more until Christmas!”

“Presents to help you in the coming days,” said Aslan, “until you sit your thrones in peace and plenty.” The soldiers set the crates down and opened them. From the first of them, Aslan withdrew a bow of deep red wood, and a quiver of fearsome black arrows, alongside a hunting horn. “For you, Princess Piper, a weapon of terrible power. Be careful whom you take aim at, for these arrows do not miss. And this horn. Blow it in time of great need, and you shall find the help you seek.” Piper accepted the items with reverence, carefully testing the bowstring and feeling the arrows.

Aslan turned to her younger brother. “For you, Prince Hayden, a sword that will never tarnish, whose edge will never dull.” Boden, looking over his shoulder, gasped. “Is that King Peter’s sword? Look! It even has the inscription on it!” Indeed, down the length of the blade, the words “When Aslan bares his teeth, winter meets its death” were etched in gold. Hayden bowed his head and accepted the weight of the weapon with gratitude.

Aslan turned to Skylar. “For you, brave Skylar, a gift _and_ a burden, for you of all your siblings are the most beset by skepticism, which you must shed.” He presented her an amulet, a pair of twined dragons, which bound itself fast to her arm as soon as she put it on. She shook it, but did not feel any different. “What does it do?”

Aslan sighed heavily. “It will help you to grow, soon enough. But now, for young Boden, first and closest to me.” He took out of the chests a simple wooden cup, that of a carpenter perhaps. “I’m afraid I do not have Lucy’s cordial, but this may do you as well. A drop of liquid spilled from this will heal any wound, even those most mortal. Use it to keep your brother and sisters from harm. And this,” he removed the last item, a simple silver dagger, “will slay any enemy with the slightest of pricks. Use it to keep _yourself_ from harm.”

Boden gave his best impersonation of a courtly bow, which caused all the others to laugh. They all thanked the Lion, and morale was high all around, though Skylar still had doubts. A question that had always bothered her. “But Aslan- what about the _other_ religions? If your kingdom is here on earth, what about the muslims and hindus and shin-toe-ists and the Russians?” Skylar was unclear on which were religions and which were simply _other_ , but she was _very_ clear that her Father thought they were all bound for the hot place. “Surely they can’t _all_ be sinful and wicked, can they?”

The Lion frowned, and she flinched to see his displeasure. “No, brave Skylar. They can’t all be. I will take the truly righteous among them into my service and country, after their deaths, for they were rendering service to _me_ the whole time, and their hearts shall be filled with joy to know it. _After_ their deaths. The Kingdom on Earth will be a realm for those who knew me in life. Now, let us away.” Skylar was not entirely satisfied with this answer- it seemed a little _dismissive_ of something like seventy percent of all human faith- but held her peace lest she risk his further displeasure, even as the Lion turned and let out a mighty _roar_ that caused another doorway to shimmer into existence.

“But where will we go now, Aslan?” asked Skylar, itching at her new bracelet.

“We will return to Missouri. The Mormons believe it to be the site of the Garden of Eden, you know. Not entirely inappropriate that what began there, might also end there. We will gather our army, to add to these ranks. And then- we will hunt the Dragon.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover art is here- first draft thanks to the incomparable rhl_shen: https://imgur.com/a/cYyjCBC  
> Check out her instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/rhl_shen/
> 
> Full version coming soon!

I stared at the phone I’d pulled from my pocket. _This isn’t my phone._ It _looked_ like mine, to be sure. But I had used up the batteries on mine trying to call emergency services, the night of the Swap, and left it plugged in at the house in the hopes that power might come back. _I wonder if the cat’s doing okay,_ I idly thought, still staring at the slab of black glass now buzzing in my hands.

The caller ID said ‘U͔͙̮̘͞n͚̭͕̪̤ḳ̛n̛̫͉̞͓̪̩͕ow̧̭̼n̹̺̻̞̠͟.’ Distortions and all. _That is… probably not a positive indicator._ I thumbed answer anyway. Put it on speaker. A voice came through- it sounded like a genial middle-aged woman. “Oh! Took you long enough. I thought-” She didn’t even get out the first sentence. Haley grabbed the brick out of my hands, _snapped_ it, and flung it away into the rubble and chaos of the park.

“Nope. None of that,” was all she said.

I stared in shock and confusion for a minute before my mind caught up to me. _“Haley!_ That could have been… answers, or something!”

She was still in the buff, but moving forward now, headed across the grass toward the nearby towers, and no doubt the shopping center within. “Could have been. If it is, I have a feeling they’ll call back. Sean, have you noticed anything _unusual_ about the events of the last day?”

Well if that wasn’t the world’s most understated question. “No, I mean, my _commute_ seemed a little longer than-”

She wasn’t in a joking mood, I guessed. “Shoosh. Not the magic or Cecilia. Everything we’re doing has been on a _script._ A hero’s journey.”

I tried to piece that together. “I guess I can see that. You’ve got the Call to Adventure, the Supernatural Aid, hello Sherriff,” he acknowledged me from the back of my mind with a wave, “The literal Road of Trials last night and this morning, and then this is what today, the First Threshold?”

She walked up to the double glass doors of the town center mall and plaza. Locked, but insufficient. With one hand she simply shoved _through_ the pane, and it failed to lay a scratch on her as it shattered. _I guess Rules As Written still apply, she has the form of a human but she hasn’t given up her strength or natural armor. Interesting to see it in action._ “Yes, and even after the macro-level, the comparison holds up. Our party was split up, and we met again at the climax with important revelations. There was a trial, and a monster, and a crux. We came out of it with _loot,_ honey.” She gestured at the conceptual sword, still clutched in my hand. “Actually, let me borrow that.” We had walked just inside, to a clothing boutique. The security barriers were down. I had no doubt she could make short work of them if she chose, but- I handed over the sword.

One casual swing and the barrier just _separated_ . No noise, no resistance. Just a smooth horizontal motion and the metal segments clattered to the floor. _Damn, that’s sharp._ She shoved open the door- breaking the lock, I noticed- _I really hope we don’t end up on the hook for all this-_ and went inside. “There’s no part of this that doesn’t fit a narrative reading. I don’t like it.”

I could understand that. Maybe it was just that I’d been… _ordinary_ , for 35 years, but I wanted to be a hero now. I was _excited_ by the call to adventure. But… “If I’m going to be a hero, I want it to be on my terms.”

She nodded, while heading into the back of the store, behind the counter- searching? Ah, for a first aid kit. Good thinking, that. “Yes, exactly. Something is railroading us into a swords and sorcery fantasy. I’m beginning to develop some theories about the rules of magic, or whatever this force is. We’ve got two distinct instances now, discounting the Swap for a moment.” She came over to me, began disinfecting and bandaging the worst of my cuts from our fight.

I considered. “Both empowered by the rules of different fictional settings?”

“Right again. Rules that, when they came in conflict with each other, seemed to have a clash over priority.” _Right, the way I could remember Wonderland and nobody else could._ “And, both sets of powers centered entirely around one person. But there are differences. _She_ was already living in some version of her fantasy, before the Swap. And _she_ could pull creatures out of thin air, to serve her. _I_ certainly _knew of_ Pathfinder, and I _liked_ playing it, but-” She produced a suture kit and began putting that Heal skill to work, doing up the wound in her side as she talked.

I got it. “But you weren’t _absorbed_ by it and you certainly didn’t think you were a dragon. And you _still_ can’t summon items or anything. Right?” She paused, closed her eyes for a minute, then shook her head. _Damn. Would have been convenient._ I continued. “So why did you both get changed? Is it random? How many people did it happen to? How _powerful_ can this magic be? What if somebody got, I don’t know, a rule set based on _Dragonball?_ Is there someone out there who’s gonna crack the _planet_ in half, if they get mad enough?”

A phone next to the cash register began ringing. _Again, with no power._ I ignored it. She grabbed some clothes, walked back into the changing rooms. I heard her calling from there. “Too many questions. Boil it down. _What are the rules?_ You seem to be affected by the adventure narrative too. Is that because you’re near me, caught up in my RPG thing, or because it’s a meta-rule?” She pointed at me for approval of her chosen outfit. I played the dutiful husband role to the hilt, if only to get a second look at her. I eventually nodded, and she left to go change.

Hmm. “Cecilia was caught up in it too, wasn’t she. Her power had a radius. Yours might too. It’s possible I didn’t… _wake up_ , until you got close enough. But she still got set up into the role of villain. And I was speculating on you becoming… _heroic…_ as early as this morning. In fact, _nobody_ has been as alarmed by the sudden and catastrophic end of our civilization as they should be. Including me. I think… you may be right. Somebody’s out to make a hero of you.” I was getting more and more uneasy as I spoke. _Something_ about what I was saying was off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. _What did I miss?_ I consulted Sherriff, wordlessly. He seemed as baffled as I was.

She came out. Black shirt, khaki cargo pants, with a set of belts and an improvised sheath for the vorpal sword. She had that long black hair tied back- not much could be done to conceal the tiny golden horns, but she had sunglasses to cover the cat’s-eyes. I doubted they impaired her much even in this darkened mall, with her draconic darkvision. “You uh, you look like a Lara Croft cosplayer.”

She smiled. “Well, I’m trying to keep it functional. Help me get a few changes in case I have to get all scaley and end up ruining these. But yes, you’re all caught up. Get that, will you?” This, to the phone still ringing on the desk.

“Okay, but remember that ‘Refusal Of The Call’ is also a part of the standard narrative,” I said, moving to the desk.

“It’s not a refusal. I’m ‘Opening Negotiations With The Call.’” She said, making air quotes. I picked up the phone, put it on speaker. That same woman’s voice came through again.

“ _Don’t hang up!”_ were the first words out of it. The voice sounded a little bit frantic. “Please you’ve got to listen. You’re getting this call as part of the fulfillment of a wish that you _will_ make, several days from now. Something terrible happens in a few days and you condemn that _entire timeline_ just to get yourself answers a few days earlier, and causality loops are _expensive,_ so I’ve got to give you your answers now or- or- well I can’t do this again.” Uh- I glanced at Haley. She seemed just as puzzled as I was.

She ventured an answer. “Okay, no hanging up. Who is this?”

The voice took on a tone of relief. “Oh thank goodness. For lack of a better term, this is The Coordinator. Uh. I don’t normally speak to you. Um.”

Haley put her hands on her hips. “Well you’re speaking with us now. Thanks? I’m unclear on if I _literally actually_ erased the universe for this phone call or if that’s just a _potential_ outcome.”

“Oh it was just a projection, but our projections are _extremely_ thorough. We don’t like actual time travel, it’s too costly. Though now of course you’ll _have_ to make the wish to close the causal loop or you _will_ be erased from existence.” I couldn’t tell if it was joking. It was saying all of this in an almost cheerful, upbeat tone.

I interjected. “Uh, if I can just butt in here- _what_ are you? Are you sentient?”

There was a bit of a pause on the line. “Alright, how about I tell you what I’m _allowed_ to tell you, before you ask any more difficult questions, okay? Here is the message I am relaying, containing the information you _would_ have learned in good time: Yesterday there was an… Event, let’s say. Your universe intersected in multi-dimensional space with another. It happens, from time to time. Both were _highly_ damaged, and had to be bootstrapped from your base consciousnesses. But something went wrong.”

This was all going too fast. Haley tried to draw it out. “Elaborate on that last?”

“Oh, you don’t have a Theory of Mind yet in your universe, sorry- okay bullet points version, meat brains are just storage, your active consciousness inhabits a million different bodies throughout the multiverse over its time-line, moving on” _Wait you can’t just drop that people on mushrooms are probably right about everything and then move on-_ but it could, and it did, at the same nearly-manic pace. “Normally these collisions happen between unrelated collectives but this time you managed to intersect a universe that will exist later on the timeline that many of your consciousnesses share. When we rebooted, there was a… mix-up.”

Haley and I shared a look. I said it: “The Swap.”

“Yes! Oh, good name for it. Some of the versions of you that were rebuilt turned out to be from the wrong world. Like. Half of them.”

Haley objected to this. “But that- if I’m understanding the bits of conversation between Sean and Sherriff I’ve overheard, they are at least 200 years behind us, growth-wise. You’re saying they just _happened_ to have 2 billion identical minds?”

The voice, clearly happy to be giving relevant data, perked up. “Oh yes! Not all at once, mind you. As the reboot created you, it drew from a lot of different time periods in their world. I think you’ll find you have quite the grab-bag of eras among your visitors. All just part of the problem. _Anyway._ As part of the collision, cracks formed in the, uh, ‘universal boundary’ between your reality and our higher-dimensional one. Entropy is escaping through these cracks via mechanisms like the one you encountered today.”

I was lost on that one, but Haley stepped in. “You’re saying that people like Cecilia are being powered by some kind of cosmic entropy drain _out_ of our universe? How many like her are there? Is that what _I_ am?”

The voice was not terribly reassuring, even as it maintained that cheerful tone. “Yes, oh, you’re so clever! Well done! Exactly- the power will always earth itself in rule sets that allow for entropy transference. The exact form will be different each time! The precise count is still coming in, but for now we estimate approximately one ‘Earthed’ consciousness for every one million currently on your planet. The drain will escalate over time! And that’s where _you_ come in!”

Haley seemed cautious, not without reason, I thought. “I come in… how?”

The tone didn’t waver in the slightest. “Well you kill them, of course! You plug the leaks. We simmed quite a few people and you were by far the most likely to survive long enough to accomplish the role. We plugged you into your own hand-crafted boundary source, based on a ruleset you should understand. Now just get out there and do your thing, slugger! The rest should happen naturally!”

“So I’m literally fix-a-flat but with murder and cosmic magic.” It _was_ a little anticlimactic. And chilling. The voice didn’t seem to mind that it was casually discussing at least seven or eight thousand murders, if my math was right. She thought for a second. “No.”

The voice seemed nonplussed. “Excuse me?”

Haley slashed her hand down in negation. “No negotiation. This is me, Refusing The Call. You aren’t offering me demands _or_ contracts, you’ve just set up dominoes and you expect them to fall. You don’t care what happens to this world. To its people. You’re trying to seal a- a _leaky pipe,_ using human _lives_. Take my powers back, or whatever, I won’t be your hit woman.”

The phone was silent for a long moment. I held my breath. _Could this be it?_ On the one hand, no powers- she’d be as vulnerable as anyone else. As _I_ already was. On the other hand, no more responsibility- we could go back home, see our families. _Oh god, our families, we need to check on them-_ my train of thought was interrupted by laughter. Over the phone, slow at first, almost ominous, but then it built up into near hysteria- it was like a robot who’d only ever had laughter _explained_ before, trying to emulate it. It cut off as suddenly as it started. “Oh, no need to worry about refusing or taking it back, that’s what makes dominos so effective! They always fall in the end. It’s kill or be killed out there, kiddo, and you’re like a beacon to them. _They’ll_ be coming for _you._ Ciao!” The phone clicked off.

 _Uh._ Well, that was all extremely ominous. We stood there for a while, staring at the silent phone in the dark of the department store. Haley finally kicked into gear, mind still turning after all that. “Yeah, well, this domino might have a surprise or two for you. Sean, she- _it-_ was lying.”

I turned to her. “Lying about which part?”

Haley frowned. “I’m not sure. Not… _all_ of it? But did you notice? It didn’t say anything-”

“About the meta-narratives, yeah. Cecilia wasn’t just drawing power from elsewhere, she was drawing _form._ Also, the voice acted like giving cosmic powers to a random person was _normal._ You think she…”

“I don’t know what to think. Not yet. I have a couple of guesses. Number one- that wasn’t a human, and whatever it _was,_ only had the loosest conception of morality.” I shuddered a bit. It _seemed_ pretty obviously inhuman, but still- to think we might be at the mercy of something that didn’t really understand right or wrong, as we saw it. It made me shudder. “Number two- I’m not 100% convinced that whatever it was is actually the source of my powers.”

I asked the obvious question anyway. “What makes you say that?”

Her frown grew more thoughtful. “Well, first off, it didn’t ask _permission_. According to it, it just found the first person who it thought would do the killing, either from altruism or ruthless survival instinct, and it loaded them up. I’m not even sure it read the _rules_ for my rpg before it used them. It’s like giving an atom bomb to a baby. Second of all, it didn’t take them _back_ when I indicated I wouldn’t work for it. If giving power was so easy, and it had no concept of morality, why not take it back? _Third_ of all, I got _another_ power, when I got my shape changing. _Detect Evil._ I was using it on that phone- it was _radiating._ If _I_ were handing out superpowers-”

I finished the thought. “I sure wouldn’t give someone a power that told them not to trust me.”

She nodded. “Whatever was at the source of that call, it was trying to play us.”

Okay. I was feeling better and better about this quest all the time. “What were your other guesses?”

“Number three- the leaks. I don’t think we got the full story. _Why_ did the universe need to be rebuilt from our minds? Why would the leaks originate there, with stories? Why would higher dimensional beings even _care_? We got just enough to give me a motive to kill the others if they threaten us.”

She paused for a minute, then continued. “Number four. I don’t think their sim of me is very good, at all.”

I nodded. “Because they assumed you’d kill for them?”

“Not just that. They assumed I’d risk _ending the universe_ just to get a message back in time. To avert some crisis. Whatever they were running…”

I finished her thought. “It didn’t sound like you at all. So they fucked up. They _didn’t_ give an atom bomb to a baby?”

Finally, she smiled again. But it was a black thing, full of malicious intent, as she turned and headed out of the gloomy mall. “They _really_ fucked up. Someone just got the Infinity Gauntlet, and her deepest wish _isn’t_ just to murder her way back to the way things used to be. They gave it to an _effective altruist._ ”

I laughed. “You and your way with words. Who else could make wanting to do the most good sound so _ominous?_ Also, do we really have to walk all the way back to the truck?”

“We do if we want to complete the errands. I’m going to need a lot of gold and gems, and the infomorphs are going to need those data sticks.” All that had happened today and she was still mission-focused.

 _I_ felt like I was about two minutes from passing out from burns and blood loss, but I pressed on for her sake. “Okay, you may have to drive though.” We walked on. The sun was still high in the sky. Hard to believe it had hardly been an hour. Time was moving so fluidly for me now, it was difficult to keep track. We were actually just a few city blocks from the office I worked at. Used to work at. I assumed I wouldn’t be going there anymore, after today. “Hey, do you remember the first time we came down here?”

She was looking up at one of the buildings. There were so _many_ towers down here and I had no idea what half of them were for. Strange to think what humans could build in just a few decades, if the money was right. If the incentives were there. “Of course. You were so excited about this new job, a chance to get away from the dead ends in Vidalia. You wanted to show off everything, even the parking garage.”

“It was just… all so new! I’d never worked downtown. All those years in one podunk town after another, where the buildings never got over two stories tall and every neighborhood was gradually decaying into some kind of third world nightmare, the residents voting for it all the way. The city gave me _hope_ , you know? For the first time in a decade. Looking at all this structure, all this _purpose_. Surrounded by so many energized young people, I thought maybe the human race was worth a damn after all.”

She smiled, but not for me, I thought. “It was worth a damn even when it was just mud huts, you know.” I watched her then. She wasn’t even looking at the architecture. She was looking _beyond._ “I don’t even see buildings here. I see _trajectory_. Human growth, unchecked. Years on years on years of systems and compaction and new systems. How far would we go in another two hundred, if it didn’t all collapse into resource starvation? Is this the height of it? Is this the pinnacle, or are we still rising? What’s the story of our species? Did the Swap alter it?”

“I guess that’s impossible to answer now.” I thought of all the lives lost in the last day. _Half of all of us, just… gone, somewhere else. And it’s only beginning. What will we be now, in 200 years? Will we even exist?_

She nodded, distantly. “It’s a problem, and a tragedy. But… humanity has always overcome. Half of us are still here. The _cities_ are still here, the knowledge, the resources. Chaos is coming, but I don’t think the species is done for. It might even be the thing that saves us, horrifically, from some climate catastrophe. It’ll be a lot easier to cut emissions now. The story of human history may be drifting towards a conclusion, but… new possibilities are opening up. This might be a feint.”

“Just spare a thought for us poor benighted normies as you steer this brave new world, okay? You know I love you, and I _trust_ you, but from where I’m standing- what you’re talking about is pretty terrifying, given that you may have the power to _do_ something about it soon.”

She took my hand, held it. “I love you too. You keep me grounded, Sean. If I start going too fast, pull me back. You’re the universal advocate.” _Oh, no pressure then._

“So, once we’re back… what will we do?” We’d discussed plans briefly, but hadn’t settled on anything. That gleam was back in her eye though.  
“We’ve got to last long enough for me to start accumulating caster levels. That’s about 4 days from now. So, _first,_ it’d be nice if we could get something to eat, and _then_ , I think I’d like to rock your world with this new body. But after that… hopefully we can convince our refugees to listen to us. We stock up, we fortify, and we tap the refugees for manpower. We hold out. And,” she laughed, and I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse than the laughter from that presence on the phone earlier, “we find out what the yield on this atom bomb _really_ is.”


	11. Chapter 11

After an enormously stressful day-and-a-half, it was good to have a little peace on the horizon. We limped back into the stadium after dark, but activity hadn’t ceased. It looked like some stability had been restored to civilization in our absence, because the power was on at the field, and someone had turned the lights on. Tremendous flood lamps lit the night, and the field was swarming with activity. The informorphs had been _busy_.

I saw that some kind of clothing industry had been set up- a lot of the seats had been massacred and the bug-like vessels were walking around with sashes and bags made from the sewn canvas. A veritable shanty-town was beginning to go up in the corners of the field, made from scavenged sheet metal and lumber. I was put in mind of the stadium-city from _Fallout 4,_ though hopefully this one would prove to be a little less radioactive.

A great cheer went up when people noticed us entering- I supposed word of our mission had spread- and we grabbed a number of infomorphs to help unload the data sticks and mass-copy devices that would serve as their improvised food supply. Haley was a little startled, at first. “I honestly thought I’d have to introduce myself all over again with the change of body, but I guess it doesn’t make as much of a difference to them.”

I grinned, standing in the flatbed and dividing our jewelry loot from the general spoils. “Well, _I’d_ know you anywhere.”

My chivalry did not impress. “You literally tried to murder me yesterday, in our own home.” _That_ old jab got a chuckle out of Sherriff, who’d been largely taciturn ever since he’d lost his voice. I could _feel_ it regrowing, in his mind, and knew it wouldn’t be long before he weighed in again. I welcomed it- I could really use his experience.

“Oh are you going to keep harping on that _forever_ ? Help me down, m’lady.” I dismounted _very_ gracefully, I thought, given my burns and lacerations and general condition. Barely even fell completely to the ground. The “Council” at the front gate had changed slightly, adding a few new faces since our departure in the afternoon, but I still recognized the EMT- the name on his badge said “Kevin.” He took one look at me, grimaced, and headed back to his truck, I assumed to scavenge for medical supplies.

I handed off the info sticks to Cyran, the large beetle who’d performed food research last night and was swiftly becoming the quartermaster for this little band we’d collected. By the time I was done with that, Haley had already got a crowd of people and more than a few vessels surrounding her. I didn’t know if it was word from the outside they were wanting- surely with the power back on, the radio stations would be broadcasting news? Or maybe they really _did_ look to her as a community leader already. She had gathered them, after all, and we were already establishing a reputation as troubleshooters. Our growing authority was what we’d decided to address, in the truck on the way back.

Haley spoke without focusing on anyone in particular. “Hello everyone. Yes, we have a lot of news about downtown. Things are okay now, but they were pretty grim for a while there, and there’s bad news on the horizon. But I don’t want to repeat myself, and there’s a number of organizational things that we’re going to need to get done. We’d like to formalize some things, before we go any further. Could you find the people who have taken charge on the infomorph side, and ask them to meet with us? Also, do we have any human food? Neither of us have eaten since yesterday.”

As luck would have it, at least one scavenging party had hit a grocery store earlier, and there was a well stocked kitchen for the time being. While we made sandwiches and got bandaged by Kevin, the wise council of bug-people elders was gathered. I recognized the little mustachioed roly-poly doctor from that afternoon- he introduced himself as Vulmar- and Delmutt the woodcutter from our first night at home, which was a pleasant surprise. There was a hulking beetle that looked like it could mount a canon, or tear one in half, which Sherriff’s memories told me was a soldier vessel, and there was a waterbug-looking merchant sailor. Alongside them were Kevin and Ivona, an eastern european woman who had apparently come in late in the day with about 100 vessels that she had personally saved from her surrounding neighborhoods. We said our hellos (and I was quietly a bit stunned that the infomorphs now spoke fluent English, but glad Sherriff’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain. The _rate_ that information must have spread in their old society...) and then sat down to business.

We explained some of the situation of the past day- our reality-bending encounter with Cecilia and the Wiltshire Dog, for the most part. The phone call was mentioned as background material but most of the… _personal_ details, we left omitted as we’d decided earlier. There was some interest in the vorpal sword, which Haley demonstrated as proof of our claims. The group spent several minutes trying to find an edge on the thing without ever quite agreeing where one was.

“I’ll get right down to it,” said Haley, looking around the group. “Have any of you had encounters with magic in the last day and a half? Anything, since the Swap, that could not be explained by normal physics?”

Vulmar chuffed in indignation. “ _Magic_ she says! You red-blooded flesh sacks want to know if I’ve seen _magic?_ I was _transported_ to a _different world_ where people have to put _matter_ in their bodies and, and, and _dissolve it for food!_ _Everything_ here is magic!” Even as he waved his countless little arms for emphasis, there was a general round of agreeable nods from the other infomorphs present. I supposed it _would_ be difficult to distinguish, amid all the other madness.

Haley smiled sympathetically. “The human contingent, then. Kevin, Ivona?” The EMT shook his head- he’d been head down seeing to everyone he could, referring those too badly injured to a nearby hospital. No supernatural wounds.

Ivona seemed more troubled. She spoke fluent English, with a slightly eastern european accent. “I was gathering the… infomorphs, as you call them- to the northeast of here. Green Springs, Milliner, that area. I did not see anything. But- already word was spreading, of _something_ happening further North. It sounded like hysteria at the time. A talking animal? An army on the march? I thought the people I spoke to were referring to the vessels. Now, I am thinking- maybe not?”

Haley and looked at each other. “Cecilia?” she asked, concern evident on her face. “The timeline doesn’t fit. She was downtown with us, to the west of here. Miles in the opposite direction.”

I nodded, “But that would mean… someone else got a fantasy novel?” _Trouble for us,_ was the feeling Sherriff was sending me. I couldn’t help but agree.

We turned back to the group. Haley made a dismissing motion. “We need to table it for now, but I’ll go look by air first thing in the morning. In the meantime, we need sleep, and we need _structure._ You are all representatives of this community by virtue of being willing to stand up and do what needs to be done in a time of crisis. People, human and infomorph, will follow you.” There was a round of semi-reluctant nodding at this. _None of these people_ want _to be in charge. Perhaps that will make them better suited for it._ Haley continued. “I would like to propose a plan of action for you.“ We had discussed this wording in the truck, as well. I had pushed for the more subtle approach. _You can’t just walk in here and take charge, especially if you’re leading them to conflict._

“Why?” came the obvious question, voiced from the soldier. “I understand that I have you to thank for the strange words on the box that got me here, and the copy of your language in my head. You clearly have some power, and we need you. But what special insight do you have, that we should follow?”

“And why should we let you _lead_ us? The government hasn’t collapsed yet.” asked Kevin, not unkindly.

Haley smiled at him, and it was a little sad. “Half the population of the world is gone or dead, and more will be following. We are insulated here, a little, but if you return to your homes tonight you are not going to find them unchanged. The world has already gone over the cliff’s edge, but acceleration hasn’t begun yet. Any student of history should be able to tell you what comes next. Once the power, and water, and food are gone. The government _has_ collapsed- whether it knows it or not, it no longer has a monopoly on the use of force, or the power to protect you. Magic is loose. And the strongmen who rise now, who _do_ possess both of those traits, aren’t all going to agree on whether this collection of refugees should be alive or dead. You _must_ recognize this, and act before they do. If you wait until it becomes apparent, you’ll be dead.”

That said, she turned to the soldier. “You have a good question, Haell. The first answer is that I have more than _some_ power. At the moment I’m the only form of magic you have access to. It’s going to grow substantially. Within a month I will be able to see to the base needs and defense of this community as well as anyone in the world. I could go off by myself and try to save the world some other way, but I feel like the only _real_ way to save the world starts with saving the parts you know.” She looked at the others. “The second answer is that I am genre savvy. There is a _narrative_ here. Things don’t just fall out like this. The events of the last 2 days have been unnatural, and you will have to forgive me for my arrogance here, but they are focused on me _._ That may rankle, but if I may offer some objective proof...” Here, she stood back and ended her human form, becoming a dragon once again.

We’d argued about this approach, in the truck. “I am telling you _nobody_ is going to be influenced by the ‘You are an NPC’ argument,” I said.

Haley was unmoved. “But Sean, _they are._ The evidence is indisputable! They’re people and they have moral worth, but whatever is happening here is clearly focused on you and I. They may get hurt just to _motivate_ me. They must understand that.”

In the moment, I thought it just might work. She was _bigger_ now, 8 feet long and easily six feet high at the head. Her horns and fins had grown, as well, and she was beginning to look a bit like a giant gold catfish. Thankfully she didn’t seem to have the moustache-esque tendrils that the _Pathfinder_ art books depicted for male dragons. I couldn’t really say why that would have bothered me _more,_ but… I liked the slightly feminine cast to her face, even like this. In any case, the effect of the transformation was impressive. She was definitely gaining charisma, in the stat-points sense, and her presence had a near-physical force now. The audience rocked back (and I mourned the loss of her Lara Croft cosplay, absorbed into her body but hopefully not destroyed) as she continued. “Third: you should listen to me because I will listen to _you_ . I am no god. But if I were I would offer you a covenant, not a list of commandments. _Mutual_ obligations. If you say no, here and now, I will go away. If you say yes and then take it back later, I will agree and step down. By saying no right now, you are cutting off options and gaining nothing.”

Vulmar objected. “Well I think this is damn well premature! You haven’t even told us what it is you’d order us to _do,_ yet.”

Haley gave the little bug-doctor a head tilt of acknowledgement. “True. I want you to _prepare_ . Those of you who are trained in combat, train the rest. Prepare more breeding space for combat capable vessels. Send out groups to scavenge as much food and weaponry as possible. Fortify this space- make it defensible. Accept those who come by, I’m not saying we need to go all _lost tribe_ here, but if we hurry, we can be weeks ahead of any other-”

Kevin interrupted her. “Are you _nuts?_ Look, ma’am, I get that shit is _weird,_ but you’re talking about going full Mad Max here! Even if half the world is _gone,_ the _power_ is on. The rumor is that the National Guard is mobilizing! You’re jumping the gun in a big way.” There were nods of agreement, even from the infomorphs.

Haley hissed in frustration. “ _Listen to me_ . I _get_ that there’s a powerful draw to inertia. You moved fast in the crisis, but now you’re safe and you have food and some part of you thinks that must mean the crisis is _over,_ that you can sit tight and someone who knows better will come along to rescue you. _Nobody is coming to save you_ . Nobody ever was! We humans were going to kill ourselves within a century with climate change, or nuclear war, or _something_ and not one person in a position to stop it was going to lift a finger! Now the pace towards that end has _accelerated_ and you’re sitting here hoping that if you just _ignore_ the bad days, the good ones will come again. It can’t happen that way. All you do if you bunch up and _don’t_ fortify is make yourselves a target.”

But the infomorphs were unconvinced. The waterbug merchant spoke up: “But _we_ weren’t on the verge of killing ourselves, miss. _Our_ food supplies are stable, thanks to you. I sailed the seas for 90 season cycles, and only ever saw the empire grow. Other civilizations came and went, but the big ones? They were stable. This new world is strange, to be sure, but here we sit surrounded by the trappings of a _great_ civilization, and you are calling for _war_ preparations! I am sorry. I will not support this plan. But you may stay here, if you wish. Strong men or no, we will greet all with open arms.” The others nodded. It was final.

I stood, then, and put my hand on her shoulder. She looked like she wanted to argue, maybe even to take the room by force, but she mastered herself, and ultimately lowered her gaze. She wrapped her scaled neck around my shoulders in a surprisingly emotive hug, and then we left. I was not sure if dragons _could_ cry, but I felt like I was about to find out.

She spoke to me softly as we walked. “All those people, Sean. We gathered them up and brought them together and now they may die because they don’t understand the _danger_ they’re in. Can’t, until the inertia in the gears of our world runs out.”

I didn’t want to tell her she was wrong, not _now_ , but I had to ask. “What makes you so sure they _are?_ They make good points. Food scarcity may not even affect the infomorphs. The power’s still running. Humanity _could_ still recover. Even if it _does_ collapse it could take years, a long slow decline that leaves plenty of time for us. We don’t _know_ that there’s another magical threat on the horizon, even.”

She looked at me with love and maybe a touch of despair. “Sean, how many threats did Sherriff’s world have? How many diseases?”

Surprised by the change of direction, I wracked my brain. “Uh, well, he can remember a memetic virus that spread on visual contact and encouraged the infected to replicate it. Also there’s a type of mental disorder slash disease that some infomorphs go through where they stop really grasping the boundary between their thoughts and others and their minds overwrite the values of victims with their own, sometimes unintentionally. Uh, there’s a couple of natural predators of infomorphs who latch on and remove information about themselves from the victim’s mind. Lots of afflictions of the vessels, of course, probably bacterial and-” I stopped, catching up. “And we don’t have immunity to _any_ of them.”

Haley sniffled. It was distractingly cute. “Maybe three billion humans left on earth assuming nobody’s done anything stupid like started a nuclear war elsewhere. Even with no magic in the mix, how many in a year? Two years? With _memetic diseases_ on the horizon?”

I agreed. “But there _is_ magic in the mix. Which might save lives. Or… make them worse. But either way it’ll concentrate power in hands of those that can use their gifts, or those that exploit them.”

She just sounded glum now. “It all comes down to power. They’re still sitting in there, thinking that this is- is a big _storm_ , that when it comes down to it an elected official is going to set things right. It hasn’t sunk in yet for them that it’s happening _everywhere_ . The only thing anyone _without_ magic can do right now is get out ahead of it, before the rest of the world starts moving.”

I kept my hand on her back. She seemed to like scritches between the wings, when she was in this shape. “Well, they welcomed us to stay. We could stay here and protect them anyway.”

She leaned into my hand, but shook her head. “No, whatever’s happening, I don’t want to draw it down on them. But. I _did_ lie, in there. They may make no contract with us, but I have no intention of leaving them alone. We can set up somewhere near, and I’ll watch over them until we hit some point where they _can’t_ deny the world’s changed anymore, and then maybe-”

It was then that Delmutt caught up with us, scurrying on her mantis legs. “Wait!”

We stopped and turned. “Yes, miss D?”

She held up a claw for time, panting. “Sorry. Let me just. Vessel’s not made for. Running. Oof. Okay. I want to come with you. There are others.” Seeing our shared glance, she hastened “Only a few! But, we’ll trade around for soldier vessels if that’s what you want. We’ll fight. We can be extra hands for you. You don’t have to do… whatever it is you’re doing, by yourself. And-” she looked kind of bashful?

I wondered if there was a request. “Go on?”

She came out with it in a rush. “ _I want to be a dragon too_!”

\---

The next morning

\---

“Whatever it is you’re doing” turned out to be sleeping like the dead and having our wounds bandaged, but early the next morning we reconvened with Delmutt and her motley crew to make plans. There were three others beside her- she had traded for the slim dragonfly body of a scout, and the other three had taken sentinels, an ant-like form that stood on hind legs, with wide-set compound eyes and a visible neck. “Good for visibility, and rifle-work,” she explained. Sherriff approved. < _She. Make good. Choice? Choice. >_ His speech was coming back quickly now, something which we were _both_ grateful for.

The plan for the day was simple. The stadium leaders hadn’t agreed, but we still needed supplies and information for ourselves. Haley was going to fly North-East and interview locals, to see if she could spot any magical threats or potential allies, based on Ivona’s rumors. I was going to go _South_ , to collect our cat and cell-phones, use them to contact our families, and also loot as many non-perishable groceries and long term camping supplies as I could fit in the back of the truck. Both of us would keep an eye out for defensible places to hole up, though we both agreed we would _probably_ need to move to the city center and stake out a high-rise penthouse or something. We agreed to reconvene by mid-afternoon at the stadium, retrieve Haley’s newfound hoard, and decide where to make camp for the night.

I wasn’t a fan of this plan. I didn’t want to split the party a second time- if this _was_ narratively driven, didn’t it set me up to get captured again? But Haley couldn’t carry a person yet, and she’d move much faster on her own. She had me take the infomorphs. “You’re going to need protection more than I will,” she said, “and they are going to need to scavenge weapons. There are gun stores all over the place, see if you can find something they can use.” So off we went. I gave her a long hug farewell, and watched her fly away into the sky. I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, as she disappeared.

Delmutt buzzed to my side, and bobbled consolingly. I _assumed_ that was a consolation bobble. Bug body-language was weird. “Watching loved ones leave is always hard. But she’ll be back.”

That raised an interesting topic, as we headed to the truck. “ _Do_ you guys have loved ones, then?” Sherriff’s life had been… surprisingly isolated. I got in the cab with two of the sentinels and Delmutt, a cramped but workable fit. A third got in the truck bed, and we were off. “I mean, I know you don’t normally have gender, so I kind of wondered what your social relationships were, without that need for reproduction.”

“Oh but we _do_ reproduce!” She said, “Just not in the way that you do. Your breeding is much more like our vessel’s. Infomorph reproduction is… a meeting of the minds. There can be two, or three, or many. Each chooses pieces of themselves to give to the newborn. The more there are, the less each must sacrifice and regrow. But the newborn will be fully formed, with the instincts and patterns of lifetimes, when it is created. Then it is up to the parents to guide it as it finds its role in life and develops memories that solidify it in that groove.”

“Huh,” I said, kind of impressed. “That’s… actually really beautiful. So your social relationships _do_ stem from a need for reproduction, then?” It had always been a sore spot between us and other couples. We’d chosen early on not to have children. It was… not a _popular_ decision, in these parts.

“Oh not always. Sometimes you just find someone you like being around. Some people get so used to being together they end up sharing the same vessel, though that is a bit taboo. _I_ had a partner, at home.”

Oh, shit, I guess I hadn’t realized- “None of you were transferred in proximity to each other, were you? All of you split up from each other, across the planet.” Wow, what a nightmare. Why weren’t they tearing the world apart to get back to each other? I’d been with Haley for nine years, the thought of having to endure this crisis alone… it was harsh enough that I almost turned the truck North to drive after her, as we pulled out of the stadium.

Delmutt nodded sadly. “We’d lived together for fifteen season cycles. They were… sweet, and funny, and smart, and they had the most amazing wood carving techniques, I could sit and watch for hours. Infomorphs are _very_ long-lived, compared to your species. Very few moving parts. We might live five or six hundred cycles, but accidental death tends to claim us first. If we survive all of this, we’ll find each other again. I have faith in that.”

Sherriff was strangely muted, in the back of my skull. He seemed like he was… in mourning? I wanted to ask him why, I _knew_ he had nobody like that in his life. _Maybe that’s why._ It was interesting, knowing he _was_ me on some level. His life had been so violent, so _driven_. Was that who I’d have become, without Haley?

I tried to be reassuring. “We’ll find your family, Delmutt. We’re off to find a way to contact mine, today. But we’ll get you all in touch with each other. Somehow.” _I just hope Haley’s wrong. The infrastructure of this world needs to hold together for a little longer and maybe we can steer it back on course._

But then I turned on the radio, and started learning just how right she was.


	12. Chapter 12

Haley _ached_. Twice in the last day, she’d been shot. Twice! Her ludicrous growth rate was affecting her healing- both wounds should have put her out of action for days or weeks, but the second one, the penetrating pistol wound, had already closed after a good night’s sleep. _Still, the mind doesn’t catch up as fast as the body._ She could feel the soreness in her side, anticipate the burn and protest of muscle with every movement of her powerful wings. _And the psychological scars…_ she could see the flash from the barrel of that officer’s shotgun every time she closed her eyes, the feeling as she closed her jaws on the throat of a helpless old woman- even if she _had_ evaporated like so much smoke. _I’m racking up damage in ways I can’t sustain long term._

Then there were the major disappointments of the last day. All this newfound power, this new body, and still- the world refused to turn for her. _You could add 100 points to my Charisma, I’d still be incapable of talking to normal people. I don’t know why Sean gets me as easily as he does. Nobody before him ever _listened_. Not even when it would save them. It was true, she didn’t _know_ there would be trouble with the stadium refugees, but- _it’s not a wild guess, either.__

__

But there were compensations for the pain and disappointment. _Flying_ , for example. She’d done a bit of it on the first night, and in combat, but she hadn’t really experimented yet. Her dragon’s body was _made_ for sustained overland flight. She pumped her wings twice and felt the ground fall further away before snapping them back out, holding in a glide, easily ten thousand feet up. _None of it obeys the rules_. She hadn’t done the math (yet), but it _felt_ like when she was aloft her wings were only working to sustain a body about one tenth of her actual weight. Maybe less. She could glide essentially forever, she didn’t feel the cold, and she didn’t seem to need a substantial amount of oxygen. _I’m basically an airliner. Birds don’t work like this. What’s my service ceiling?_

__

She luxuriated in the feeling of freedom that flight brought, trying to ignore all the while that she was splitting the group a second time, and the discomfort of that thought after yesterday’s events. _I’m not going to say ‘Nothing will go wrong,’ not even in my head. But- I have to trust that he’ll be okay._ She’d left the Vorpal Sword and the infomorph backup with him, and he wasn’t heading toward danger this time. Hopefully neither of them were. She knew better, though. _Whatever is to come, I just hope it hits me first._

__

She scanned the ground from her vantage point. Her vision was _far_ sharper than a person’s. She’d done some rudimentary eye tests while they’d driven yesterday and her estimate was that she could see more than four times as well as a human, at any given distance. Still, from this high up, that was the equivalent of a regular person looking at the ground from half a mile above. _Not picking up a lot of detail_. She was following the highways north-east, looking for population centers and people she could interrogate. Whatever was happening out there she wanted to _know_ before she saw it face to face. _Even if I accidentally terrify a couple of people._

__

There still weren’t a lot of people out and about. Haley was a _little_ surprised by that, but not much. _Usually when disaster strikes, it only hits a small percentage of the population. Even if a tornado hits your town, you personally are unlikely to see it. But this… this hit_ everyone, _all over the world in one night. Very few people escaped the consequences of The Swap entirely. It’s no wonder they’re all hunkering down, at least until they get hungry or the water pressure begins to drop._

__

But _low_ traffic didn’t mean _no_ traffic. She watched the cars moving on the highway with interest. _Police. Road crews. Working surprisingly hard, dragging wrecks and blockages off to the sides. Clearing the way? For normal traffic, or for something else?_ She didn’t want to talk to anyone with a gun, at the moment. She dropped down, hovered a couple thousand feet over highway 35 until she spotted a work truck way out on its own. _Maybe surveying in advance._ She tucked her wings in and dove, coming to a perfect four-point landing just a few meters from the road.

__

The guy in the safety vest and hardhat was looking over a storm drain. He didn’t hear her coming in, but he sure heard her _land_. He turned, got one glance at her, and let out a yell. “Holy _shit!”_ Haley sighed. _Right, dragon. I keep forgetting._ She sat where she was, not wanting to spook him further, and let him run for the cab of the truck. _I_ really _hope he isn’t going for a weapon. People keep trying to_ kill _me as a first reaction, it’s starting to hurt my feelings._

__

She called out to him. “Hey! I just want to talk!” This did actually seem to give him pause. She saw him peer over the top of the cab at her.

__

“Oh yeah? None of you have talked so far. What do you want?” _Guess he’s run into some infomorphs then._ It made sense- anyone Swapped out on the road, who _survived_ , was probably still hanging around or filtering in one direction or the other down the highway.

__

“My name’s Haley, I’m- I _was-_ a human. Things got kind of weird, you may have noticed.” He laughed a bit at that but didn’t relax. _Good, keep talking._ “I’ve got some questions about what’s going on with the roads here.”

__

“Yeah, we’ve _all_ got some questions” grumped the man. “I’m, uh, Ted. By the way. You don’t _look_ like the bugs, and they didn’t talk, but- why uh, why aren’t you…”

__

Haley answered the incomplete question. “Human? I don’t know. Not really. Magic? Let’s call it magic. I’m on the lookout for _more_ magic and instead I find you guys clearing the wrecks. Did someone _ask_ you to, or are you just… trying to get back to normal?”

__

He looked a little wary at this line of questioning. “I don’t think there’s any _getting back_ , lady. But the Army says jump, these days I’m just gonna ask how high. They want all the major access in and out of the city cleared, everything off to the sides. We cleared from the south to the city on 35 yesterday, now we’re headed up north. Lots more of the bugs up here.”

__

That reminded her. “What are you _doing_ with them, when you find them?” _Please don’t be killing them on sight._

__

He nodded. “Well whatever they are, they can’t talk to us and we can’t talk to them, so mostly I just leave em alone. Orders are to radio for help if we run into any _resistance_ but I kinda got a feeling that if any of them wanted to _resist_ I wouldn’t be around to work the _radio_ , if you know what I mean. Any of us crews start going silent, you better _believe_ it’s gonna be raining lead though. I was just about to check that pipe, see if any of em had holed up in there- you wanna poke your head in?”

__

_Might as well, he’s being very reasonable all things considered._ “Uh, sure.” She got up from her sitting position and walked down the embankment to the culvert where the pipe started. Poking her head in, she allowed her darkvision to adjust. She turned to call out- “Nope, nothing in-” when she heard the sound of a door slamming and an engine starting. _Ha! He totally suckered me. Get away while the monster’s distracted. You’ll go far, Ted._

__

Shaking her head, she launched back into the air with a kick from her hind legs and several huge downstrokes of her wings. _So the military’s coming in but people still haven’t heard from any civil authorities. Well, if they can clear the roads, maybe they can hold the city, keep the food coming. But…_ the scale of the disaster was just too big. If it was one town, in one part of the country, sure they could hold on, keep the lights on and the food moving in. _But it’s everywhere. Whatever we’ve got here, that’s what we have to use. The military’s just going to use it up faster._ She decided to note potential grocery stores on her way back. There was an Aldi’s just down the highway, and- were those cars, in the lot? People out scavenging?

__

Her sudden interest may have saved her life. As she rolled in midair to look, the black arrow racing for her heart instead caught her in the shoulder. _AHH!_ It sank in a good three or four inches, she could _feel_ the coolness of the metal that had torn straight through scale and muscle. _Oh god!_ She couldn’t fly- her right wing wasn’t responding correctly. Only hundreds of feet up, still arcing upwards, she had seconds before she plowed into the tree line. _Might not be fatal but whoever just shot me will follow up. Think fast, Haley._

__

She _Shape Changed_ into a viper. _Time to find out if falling works on Earth rules or Pathfinder rules._ The arrow slipped out as her body lost nearly all mass and volume, but the wound remained. Within seconds she was a tiny mass of golden scales. _I’ve got to be about a foot long, and a pound or two at most. If this is Earth rules, my terminal velocity should be negligible. If it’s Pathfinder rules…_ Pathfinder rules on falling were _stupid_ , Haley thought. Basically 20d6 from this height, no exceptions, no matter the size or shape of the person doing the falling. For further insurance she closed her eyes and quickly maxed out Acrobatics, Bluff, and Stealth. _Okay, time to Not Die._

__

She whipped her body in an undulating motion, hoping to convert some of that speed into forward momentum, as she’d seen tree snakes do in a documentary somewhere. The trees whipped around her- her tiny body missed them all, thankfully. The actual landing was rough but not devastating. The wound in her shoulder-now-ribs ached, and she felt bruised and shaken, but it didn’t _feel_ like she’d taken her entire HP pool in one go. _Guess it was Earth rules._

__

Moving quickly she hid her tiny form in the underbrush of the woods. _I don’t know if this would be an opposed skill check, but between the size of this snake bod and my skill ranks I’ve got to have damn near +20 in ‘How Not To Be Seen.’_ Settling down, she waited. She didn’t have long. Presently the sound of engines could be heard. 4-Wheelers, out here? But what came into view first was a bit more surprising.

__

Three children, two boys and a girl, dressed in medieval finery and riding _horses_. One of them, the girl, held a longbow with a large black arrow nocked. _Well, guess I know who shot me_. They were wearing tiny gold circlets on their heads. _Crowns?_ Alongside the kids there was a… was that another _dragon_? It didn’t look much like her- for one thing it was substantially larger- but for another, it was potbellied and green. _From another story source, then._ It _too_ was wearing a tiny circlet, and looked abjectly miserable for some reason. Finally in the little hunting party… _hold the fucking_ **_phone_ ** _._ A regal Lion, clearly intelligent, wearing some kind of war-plate and barding decked with Christian iconography.

__

_Did I- did I just get shot down by the Chronicles of Fucking_ **_Narnia?_ **

__

Behind the children’s hunting party, a retinue of a dozen armed men on ATV’s was hanging back. One of them caught her eye- a man in a black jacket and cowboy boots, with a wicked smile on his face. It might have been a trick of the light, but it seemed like he _winked_ at her when her eyes moved across his. She went still, but he didn’t alert the others. _Imagination’s getting to me._ _All these guns, I guess someone doesn’t trust kids with swords to get the job done._ The children were arguing among themselves as they searched, and she strained herself to try to listen in.

__

The oldest boy was speaking to the dragon, “I _told_ you Skylar, you should have flown after her! You could have seen where she landed.”

__

The dragon shook her head, miserably. “I could never have caught her, I don’t know how to use these wings. Oh Aslan, I hate this! Please change me back!” It looked pleadingly at the big cat.

__

Only half paying attention as he scanned the forest floor, the Lion rumbled. “I cannot, child, for I did not transform you. The pendant you wear has expressed your inner self- now _you_ must shed these scales of unbelief. I can only help when you begin the journey.” Of all of them, it was padding closest to her little refuge. _It even_ sounds _like Aslan. The question is, in this story, who’s the source and who’s the simulacrum? Sounds like the kids aren’t Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, but if they conjured Aslan, how accurate is he? I can’t possibly stand up to Lion Jesus. But I shouldn’t_ have _to, right? He should be on my side!_

__

The oldest girl spoke to the boy, “Shut it, Hayden, she’s got it hard enough. I know she fell around here _somewhere,_ maybe we can spread out and look?”

__

The Lion shook his head in negation. “No. The Dragon is a dangerous adversary, far more wily than the White Witch or even the demon Tash. We must not let her get you alone- her bite is deadly and her words are poison.” _Okay, confirmation- they are hunting me, the Lion knows my gender, doesn’t want me talking to the kids. How could he know me?_ If she stayed in her burrow much longer, he was going to step on her. _I suddenly feel much stupider, taking the form of a snake. Talk about poor first impressions._ The reasonable thing to do was to stay hidden, deny them the engagement, but she had a feeling that wasn’t an option, the way the Lion was steadily approaching. She knew she was going to have to talk her way out of this, combat was not an option. _I can’t play into his story. I’m too hurt to fight. And I’m not killing children, not now, not ever._

__

The youngest boy spoke up, “Aslan, how do you _know_ she’s bad? We hurt her and she never did anything to us. I understand that you _had_ to kill our brother, he denied you and attacked you, but this one was so _pretty_ and we didn’t even give her a chance!” He was so young, couldn’t be more than nine or so. _And already more conscience than your siblings. Hang onto it, kid._ But it gave her an opening.

__

Before Aslan’s paw could come down on her, she slithered out of her spot in the brush. _Time to sound less like Satan than I’ve ever sounded before._ “He’s right. My name is Haley, I’m a 37 year old woman from Blackwood south of here, and I don’t want to fight any of you.” _Not part of your story._ She shifted back up to her dragon self, slowly, so as not to give offense. They leapt into a war footing anyway, but held their fire. _Step one, introductions._ “Can I ask your names?”

__

The Lion growled and readied himself to pounce. “You know _my_ name, Adversary. I will not give you time to weave lies for these children-” but he was overruled. The youngest got off his horse, and walked between the Lion and Haley, arms outstretched.

__

“My name is Boden, those are my sisters Skylar and Piper, and that’s my brother Hayden. And that’s _Aslan_. He says we’re going to be princes and princesses of this world and that it’s the end of times, and that we have to kill you. But I don’t want to kill anyone! Are you really evil?”

__

_Cute kid._ She shook her head, still being careful to make no sudden movements. That lion was on a hair-trigger. “No. I don’t think I’m even evil-inclined, my family is all _Presbyterian._ Aslan, I think there’s been a serious mistake. Why do you think I’m… whatever it is you’re hunting? And, if I can ask, what are you doing here?”

__

He didn’t relax in the slightest. “You are the _great enemy_. I know your story as you know mine, and I would recognize _you_ from a hundred worlds away. You know my purpose. The golden age, the children who will be Kings and Queens of this world. This is the end game, Serpent. It is _my_ story, not yours.” That startled her. _He knows he’s part of a story? Or was that a metaphor?_ She made a mistake, then. She wanted to see how deeply he believed what he was saying. _Aslan wouldn’t lie, but he also wouldn’t mistake a random professor for Satan._ She looked him in the eyes.

__

Pain. Fire. Human misery on a _massive_ scale, stretching back thousands of years. Madness and inhuman hunger and an overriding will to power. She could _see_ his history, and his future, in those eyes. _Oh, no. You’re not what CS Lewis described Aslan as being. You’re what Aslan_ **_was._** _A tyrant and a monster. The kind of god who would create a world and leave its people to suffer and die, as a_ test _of_ faith. _The kind of god who would use children as proxy soldiers, pull them from their homes and put them through torture and hardship for the sake of prophecies_ you _wrote about_ yourself. _The god who never rules, who only returns to dole out judgement and bloodshed. The god of endings._

__

But that made no sense. _I thought Cecilia created her creatures, whole cloth. They had the attributes of wonderland because the she pulled them from the narrative of Wonderland, but they had_ her _mind. They weren’t inherently monstrous, mobs aside. How could children have summoned an Aslan who represents the_ truth _of his story rather than the letter of it? If he was a child’s imagining, wouldn’t he be kind and gentle? This thing is so ready to rip out my heart and eat it that it’s making the kids uncomfortable. Something doesn’t_ **_fit._** _One of my assumptions is wrong._

__

_Wait, did that kid say it_ killed _his_ brother?

__

She straightened her spine. “Kids. Did this thing kill one of your family members?” They nodded, reluctantly.

__

“Hunter tried to shoot Aslan first,” said Hayden, half-defensively. “He _had_ to.”

__

_They’re stuck in his version of events. Gotta break the bubble, get them questioning._ “You _did_ shoot me, and I haven’t tried to hurt any of you. Aslan’s _way_ stronger than I am, right? Why would he ever need to kill in self defense?”

__

_That_ gave them pause. The Lion attempted to pace around the youngest boy, but Haley began repositioning to keep him between them. She couldn’t help but notice that the special forces crowd had spread out as well, and several were drawing a bead on her. The Lion growled, low and threatening. “I _did not_ kill in self defense. To deny me is to embrace oblivion eternal. It is written and must be so.”

__

Haley snorted. “Not talking to you anymore, big cat. But pretty sure that last bit is _metaphorical_ , you ass. Kids. That Lion is _not your friend._ And I am not your enemy. Nobody has to get hurt here, but I need one of you to help me. One of you is going to have to take action without him telling you to. Can any of you do that, please? Are you the heroes he tells you you are? Do you know right from wrong, even if he disagrees?”

__

The Lion roared, “There _is no right_ that is not in my service! There _is no wrong_ that is not in opposition to me!” The children flinched from him. She could see the doubt in their eyes. _One push._

__

She bowed her head, exposed her neck. “You know that saving innocent lives _is_ right. My only hope is that you remember that. This is your test. Stand up now, and help, or watch me die, offering you no resistance. He said it himself- any _good_ you do, ultimately, cannot be a betrayal of him.” That rocked _him_ back on his ass. _That’s right asshole, try to tautology your way out of that one._ He opened his mouth to protest but the dragon-girl Skylar stepped forward before anything could come out. _Heck yeah, scaled solidarity, kid._

__

“I’ll help you.” She looked over her shoulder at Aslan, who had _finally_ relaxed from that attack posture. He gave her a look of deepest sorrow and disappointment, and shook his head.

__

Haley nodded, and _shifted_ again until she was a weasel, _damn weird options you got there, Pathfinder_. _Don’t you allow any_ loyal _animals?_ She scurried across the ground and up onto the great red back of the young girl. “Thank you, Skylar. You’re a better person than you know. And braver. Please just back us away from this clearing until we’re out of sight.” _Anyone shoots me, they’ll hit her. I’m really hoping they don’t want to do that. Their boss seems reluctant at least._

__

He stood and watched her go. “Child, you do not know what you have done. I will see you again, before the last battle.”

__

Skylar waddled back, and back, and they held their places. Haley breathed a sigh of relief- they didn’t want to hurt the kid. Eventually they were out of sight. Haley relaxed marginally, on her shoulder. “You’re a pretty amazing kid, to stand up to him like that.”

__

Skylar shook her head. “Shut up, you. We’re not _friends._ But… I don’t think he’s always right, either. He _gave_ me the pendant that turned me into this.” She gestured at her scaled body.

__

“If it’s any consolation, I’m not used to being a dragon either. Looks like you got the Eustace Scrubb treatment from the books.”

__

The girl cocked her head to the side. “Who? What books?”

__

“Wait, how can you not _know?_ Aslan, the outfits, all of it- it’s from a series of books called _The Chronicles of Narnia.”_

__

“Oh yeah!” Skylar bobbed her head brightly. “Boden kept mentioning and I didn’t know what he was talking about. The Bible’s a book too, I just figured it was like that.”

__

_So maybe the youngest is the source? But then why did the Lion let you go if he didn’t need you-_ her heart nearly stopped. “I’m an _idiot._ ” Distantly, she heard the sounds of engines starting. _Heading this way. Not letting me go at all._

__

“Why?”

__

Her mind was racing now. “In the book, the first one. One of the kids betrays the other three. To the White Witch. He does it for some dumb candy, little jerk, but the _principle_ is the same. ‘My story, not yours.’ That’s what Aslan said. I think we’re still inside his _narrative_ somehow. I was _supposed_ to escape that encounter with one of you in tow, to give more authenticity to whatever comes next. My lack of understanding about the _rules_ is swiftly becoming a serious liability. Honey, you’re going to want to pick up the pace if we mean to outrun those 4 wheelers, I think we’re being hunted.”

__

Skylar laughed, beneath her, but began to lope along at a pretty astonishing rate. It felt like an earthquake. “I haven’t got the _slightest_ clue what you’re talking about.”

__

“When I met the girl from Wonderland yesterday, the animals were all springing from her mind, some kind of magic power in the shape of critters from a story, but without their own _brains,_ just a bunch of behaviors to ape. But Aslan is a story that _knows_ he’s a story. He just _played_ us, you and me both. That shouldn’t be possible if you _made him up_.”

__

“Oh no, we didn’t make him! We brought him here.”

__

_Uh-oh._ “Elaborate please.”

__

“Boden said he _went_ somewhere, in the attic. To Aslan’s world. And Aslan asked him to get the rest of us, and help him cross over.”

__

_Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh._ “Then… assuming that’s true. Cecilia was making copies, Wonderland through an imperfect lens, but you… brought something back with you. From wherever he came from, outside our world.”

__

“What does _that_ mean?”

__

“I told Cecilia yesterday that there are no monsters, just people. But… I think your furry friend might be a cosmic terror from beyond time and space, sweety.” _And if he is, our timetable for averting the end of the world just shortened considerably._

__

Neither of them had anything to say to _that,_ so they ran in silence for a few minutes. Eventually, the slow pace started to chafe. The engine sounds were growing louder, through the forest. “Skylar, how about we teach you how to use those wings?”

__

The dragon-girl bobbed her head. “Okay. I mean I can jump and stuff, but I flap and flap and just kind of waggle up and down.”

__

Haley patted her with one weasly paw. “It’s harder than it looks. Draw _in_ on the upstroke, push _out_ on the down…”

__

Minutes later, they were soaring above the treeline. The wind threatened to dislodge Haley from the young girl’s back. “Wheeee! Miss Haley, I’m _flying!_ Oh, I take back everything I said about this body!”

__

_Ice broken_. _And hopefully, trail broken too._ “I’m glad you’re feeling better. We’ll still help you out of it, if that’s what you want. Turn to the South, there’s a whole bunch of people I’d like you to meet.”

__


	13. Chapter 13

The radio was running a special broadcast from the BBC World Service. It was the first time we’d had contact with the world outside our little city in nearly three days, and I had _expected_ it to be bad, but- it was so much worse. _Nuclear exchanges in Korea, Pakistan, Israel. Or at least, mass die-offs that are being blamed on nukes. We have a few clues that they may not all be related._ Great Britain was apparently overrun by a- a _zombie plague,_ so either someone had tapped into _28 Days Later_ or we had confirmation that an infomorph memetic virus was infectious to people. Large portions of the world were complete write-offs. Many governments had collapsed. Something had _happened_ in Washington, nobody had got in or out, and the US federal government was effectively gone. State level governments did not seem to be functioning either, though the guy on the radio was keeping it too high-level to be really certain. _Basically it’s fucked._ Like I said- not _surprising,_ but- there wasn’t any cavalry coming.

Delmutt laid a small, lacey wing over one of my shoulders in a gesture of solidarity. “I’m sorry, for your world. I’m sure ours has endured similar. What will your people do?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Starve, die off in great numbers, I imagine. First world economies are built on near-immediate transport of goods. We don’t _make_ our fuel here, or our food. It all comes from other places. If this were one part of the world, we’d see a flood of refugees, and a great period of civil unrest as populations responded to the destabilization. But there’s nowhere to _go_ now. Everywhere on Earth just became Yemen, or Syria. War zones. The people who seize the supplies are going to dictate terms in the first few months. Haley gives us some options there- she can probably _create_ basic necessities, soon enough, maybe even in great enough numbers to make a difference. But she can’t be everywhere.”

We stopped at a gun store first. _Thank god for ubiquitous American firearms._ Locked and gated of course, and without Haley that was substantially more of a problem, but we had crowbars, manpower, and time. Within half an hour we were in. The sheer _arsenal_ in there was… ludicrous. The long rifles didn’t _quite_ fit the joints and hands of our insectoid friends (none but Delmutt had the English language module, and I’d taken to calling them Yakko, Wacko, and Dot in my head). The pistols didn’t _quite_ fit Delmutt’s scout body. But with Sherriff’s help, we managed to improvise. They even had a 50 caliber anti-materiel rifle, which I took on impulse. _I hope this isn’t a literal Chekhov’s gun._ It blew me away that all this stuff was legal- well, legal _before_ we stole it, I supposed. I picked out a pair of revolvers that were more to Sherriff’s liking and set them up in holsters on my belt. We piled ammunition and spare rifles next to the door as we “Shopped.” Next stop- food, and then home.

“Your people are very violent,” said Delmutt, repeating something one of the other three had said. She indicated the weapons scattered about. “We had weapons, but- I cannot imagine I would find this outside of a barracks. You could arm a whole town with this.” I could only agree.

“You came here in a cultural moment of great cultural upheaval. Technology uprooted these people, made them scared and uncertain. They responded with weapons and increased ostracization of perceived enemies. In another fifty years, this might all be different. Now, though…” I shook my head. _Now it’s going to make any conflict a lot worse._

Case in point: when I exited the store I discovered that we were not alone. I should have figured- with all the looting we’d been doing, it was only a matter of time before somebody took offense. _It just had to be the gun store._ A humvee was parked up next to our truck, and two men were staring at the door of the shop down the barrels of extremely-shooty looking assault weapons. One was older, fat and balding but muscled, wearing body armor and one of those quasi-militia caps. The other was a bit younger, looked a bit scared, had a leather jacket and- _is that a fucking_ **_machine gun?_ ** I really wished I had a better understanding of guns, but just looking at the size of the _barrel_ on that thing, I kind of felt like the walls of the store were not going to be much protection if he began shooting. I waved frantically behind me and the four infomorphs all backed up and got down low. _Let’s not turn this robbery into a murder, gang._

Fat body-armor guy called out. “Alright, we’re all gonna be calm here. We both know the cops ain’t gonna come today, so you and me, we’re gonna make a deal.” _Well alright, that actually sounds really reasonable._

I nodded slowly and kept my hands up. “Okay. No offense intended- if you want money, you can have it, though I don’t know if it’s going to do you much good anymore. We’re just looking for self defense here.” At the word _we,_ they got a little more alert.

“How about you all come out where we can see you, and then we’ll talk?” Said body-armor. _Well, shit, didn’t think this through. If they object to infomorphs I’m going to have to try to shoot them. Sherriff, how quick is your draw?_

< _Son they have the drop on you cold, there’s no draw on earth quick enough to save your life right now. > _

_Okay, got to rely on man’s charity to not-man then._ “Okay again. Going to warn you though, my friends are… infomorphs. Bug aliens. They’re friendly. Promise not to shoot on sight, and we’ll trust you.”

They conferred at this, young-nervous turning to fat body-armor, who never took his eyes off me. Eventually they reached some kind of agreement. “Alright. Everyone out of there, hands up.” Things got awfully _tense_ as I shuffled forward and to one side, along the store front, and then Delmutt and the trio slowly walked out and into their view. _God I hope I’m not going to get them executed at our first stop._

I tried to keep the momentum of the conversation. “You said we could make a deal. We’ve got quite a lot of merchandise here. What do you want for it?”

The man nodded. “You broke my security, too, so I’m gonna have to guard what’s left 24/7. You’re right, I don’t think money’s gonna be worth much for a while, and I already got a survival bunker set up,” _imagine my surprise, a prepper who owns a gun store in Missouri, “_ So you’re gonna have to get pretty generous. Why don’t we start with- how are you controlling them bugs?”

I made a slight hand motion to Delmutt, currently sitting on the ground. “Tell them, Miss D.”

She lifted her forelegs and waved. “He just speaks to us. We’re friends, not servants.”

They were both pretty alarmed when she spoke. “Holy _shit,_ those things can _talk?!?”_ Young one’s machine gun adjusted slightly, now covering my insectoid friends. _I don’t know why them being intelligent would make you_ **_more_ ** _nervous._

But I needed to keep this going. “They can. They’re just people. Lost, scared like the rest of us. Look if you don’t need food or shelter I don’t have much I can give you right now. But these weapons aren’t doing you any good. In a week or two, we’re going to be in a much better position to give you more or less anything you might want. Let us walk now, we’ll owe you.” _This is a weak hand. And he knows it._

Body-armor considered. “IOU’s ain’t worth a damn right now, I’ll tell you that much. Tell you what. You tell two of your bugs to come with me, do what I tell them, and then in a couple weeks you come collect em and pay that debt. You don’t come, well- at least I’ll have something out of it.”

 _Well that’s a non-starter._ I wasn’t about to trade two of the first recruits to some shithead like they were _disposable_ , even _if_ they spoke English. I considered the situation. Something was bothering me, I realized. These two, getting the drop on us- why weren’t they _in_ the store? _What makes me so sure they own any of this?_ I decided to put it to the test. “Hey, question. Inside, I saw a whole rack of compound bows with explosive tips. Is that shit really legal, here?”

Young-nervous glanced at the older one, kept moving that barrel between targets. Body-armor chuckled. “You’d be amazed what you can sell with the right licenses. We got all kinds of shit in there.” _Yeah but they don’t have any bows, I checked. You’re lying. You were coming to loot this place, asshole._

“I would be. But you don’t own this place.” They got _really_ tense at that. “But that’s okay. It just means there’s no harm, no foul. We’ll take our stuff, and be on the way.”

Body-armor shook his head. “No-can-do. You’re sending two over to us, _now_. You’ll get them back if you come to the bunker in two weeks. Just down Bishop street.” He gave me an address, I assumed for a country back lot. _Can’t let it get that far._

All I needed was two seconds and I could end this. I spoke to Delmutt, low and inaudible to the men behind the truck, with my hands still up, still making eye contact with body-armor. “Tell Yakko and Wacko to put down their guns and walk over there. The second they get to the front of that truck, tell them to drop to the ground and roll under it.” She bobbed acknowledgement and spoke to them in the machine-like language.

We all watched nervously as they set down their guns and started watching. _I_ was watching the two armed men. They weren’t professional soldiers. Try as they might, their eyes wandered to the novel sight of the two ant-like vessels walking towards them. When their attention was truly off me, I began lowering my hands to my sides. _Easy now. Hands on grips. Thumb off the clasps._

The two got to the front. Body-armor was just about to issue some kind of instruction when it happened. Both the informorphs _dropped_ , rolled, and were out of his line of sight. _Well executed, boys._ Young-nervous guy yelped and tightened his grip on that boxy machine gun, still pointed our way. _You’re off the leash, Sherriff._

My hands moved like lightning. The pistol in my right hand kicked, and the young man jerked back, sprouting blood from his left shoulder. My left hand kicked, and body-armor jerked back from the impact to his chest. _I doubt that penetrated but he felt it._ Both dropped their guns on the hood as they fell back behind the truck but I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t have sidearms. “Delmutt! Go high!” She was already up and moving when a _third_ shot rang out- and it wasn’t one of ours.

The brick work of the building exploded from behind me and I felt a line of fire across my right arm. The debris scratched at me. _They had a third person, we never even thought to look_. I saw them now- laying behind a bush on the other side of the street. It was a graze, but it _hurt._ Dot dropped to the ground, snapping shots in that general direction, but I _needed_ to get to the other side of that truck, before they recovered or shot at the two underneath it. I _sprinted,_ ignoring the sharp _crack_ of another near miss, and came around the corner of the hood.

Young-nervous was well and truly down, right hand up to the hole in his left shoulder, yelling as he tried to staunch the flow of blood. Body-armor wasn’t. He _did_ have a sidearm and he apparently knew right where I was going to be. Time slowed down as I stared down the barrel. _This is it. I’m sorry, everyone._

I heard the shot. It took a second to register it hadn’t been _him_. He fell back, a neat hole in his forehead, blood already beginning to fountain out of his nose. Delmutt. She’d killed him, just like that. I- _no, trauma later._ I ran to the bleeding young man, pulled him up between me and the rifleman across the street, put a gun to his head. Tried to ignore his screams. “Drop it! Get out here or lose a second buddy!”

There were no further shots but the man across the street didn’t move immediately. _Indecisive?_ I kept weaving a bit, moving further away to avoid letting him draw a bead on me, dragging the young guy with me. “Nobody else needs to die here!” Delmutt was buzzing in the air, getting distance on me, getting another angle on that guy. Yacko and Wacko were out from under the truck, scurrying back to their rifles. _Come on, you bastard, come on…_

He still hadn’t moved. _Is he...?_ I peered closer. _I think Dot hit him_. Delmutt buzzed over to him, and made a gesture that I assumed indicated _dead_ before alighting on him and taking his weapon. “Alright,” I said to the young guy, still shouting. “Shut up, _stand_ up, and start walking. Walk that direction for ten minutes, then you can come back. Then you need to get to a hospital. All we want is to get out of here. I’m… sorry about your friends.”

He didn’t speak, but he did as I’d instructed, a bit unsteadily. All five of us watched him, until he was much too far away for any accurate shots. As he walked, time seemed to de-compress and I felt the strength leaving my muscles. Then Delmutt spoke to the other three and they scurried to start filling our truck with the pieces we had picked out. I kept on overwatch. _Everything that’s happened so far, and that was the first man I’ve seen die_. It was a morbid thought, if only because I knew it wasn’t going to be the last. I’d seen _bodies_ , after Cecilia, in the tunnel and outside it. But I hadn’t witnessed any deaths. Hadn’t been directly involved with any either. “Delmutt.”

She flew down to me. The little pistol she had between her forelimbs had a new _weight_ to it, in my mind. She looked a little unhappy about it too. I tried to smile for her, but I’m sure even _she_ knew it was forced, body language barrier and all. “You saved my life. Thank you. I’m- this was my mistake. I should have had… lookouts, or something-”

She cut me off. “It was all of us. We’ve been talking and acting like all this is an _exercise_. A make-believe. We have to be serious now. If we’d been serious here, been the stronger group, maybe nobody would have died. You are hurt, by the way. You need attention.” I nodded. She was right. I’d gotten caught out, forced into an unwinnable situation because I hadn’t been paying _attention_ , and had to kill my way out. _I’m not the hero here. My mistakes aren’t always resolvable without bloodshed. This must never happen again._ I resolved then and there.

We loaded up, and moved on down the road.

\---

My newfound caution came in handy almost immediately. On the highway to our chosen grocery store, we were forced to pull over when we spotted a convoy headed our way. I had Delmutt and the others get as low in the cab as they could while I pulled the truck off to the side. Dozens of armored trucks, humvees, and some kind of armored personnel carrier rumbled past us, traveling in the direction we had come from. Several dozen soldiers hanging on the sides casually clocked us as they went by. I muttered to Delmutt, “Looks like the cavalry’s here after all. Guess _someone_ in government got it together.”

She squinted up at me from her hiding place with Yakko down in the footrest area of the cab. “You think they will be a positive thing?”

I shook my head, watching them fade into the distance. “I don’t know.Probably not for us- they aren’t going to look kindly on armed looters. On the other hand, they’re here early enough, maybe they can maintain order.”

A final humvee went by. It all looked like military surplus, from the forever-wars overseas that we’d been waging for half my lifetime. I spared a thought for the poor kids tapped to play soldier, stranded on the other side of the world amidst this chaos. “On the _other_ other hand, they haven’t been too great at long-term order anywhere they’ve been tried. And now we’ve got wizards and shit in the mix.”

While we were parked, I tore a strip of cloth and used it to tie the wound on my arm. It wasn’t _deep_ but it was bloody. We pulled back onto the road and drove on. But when we reached the exit for the Wal-Mart we had picked, an unfortunate sight greeted me from the highway. A national guard truck was posted up by the front doors and I could see soldiers. I stopped once again. “Delmutt, have the boys get out here. Wait with them. I don’t want these guys getting a look at armed infomorphs right now.” She bobbed in acknowledgement and the four shuffled out. I started up once again and rolled down the ramp, and into the lot.

As I pulled to the front doors a soldier came out in my path, one hand at a pistol on his hip and the other up to stop me. I took the signal, and got out. He didn’t look _hostile,_ but he didn’t look like he was having a great day, either. His eyes were drawn to the wound on my arm- bandaged now but still bloody. “You coming here for food?”

I smiled easily. Lying to people in authority had never come hard, for me. Call it a tiny streak of rebellion. “That’s right. You all taking control of distribution, then? I was just going to stock up on cans, wait this out at home.”

He nodded and waved me over to a pair of men with the most dangerous weapons of all- a clipboard and checklist. “Can you state your name, and number of dependents? We’ll give you supplies for a week, up to 4 people. More than that, we’ll need to see i.d.’s or proof.” _Well, this is damned inconvenient. Lucky our friends mostly don’t need to eat._ I took the 4-pack and they handed over a couple of boxes and two cases of bottled water. Meager, but not terrible. _And it’ll keep people from hoarding in the short term._ I loaded the boxes up in the truck bed, careful not to expose the pile of guns to any of the soldiers.

I _did_ have some questions, as long as they were here. “So, what’s the game plan with you guys? Everything’s kind of gone to shit, you here to fix it?”

Clipboard guy grimaced. “Like they tell _us_ anything? All we know is, rule one- try and keep order, treat it like a disaster situation. Rule two- you see any bugs, they go in the truck back to the FOB, shoot them if they run or fight. Rule three- when in doubt, refer to rules one and two.” The others all nodded a bit glumly. _Be glad you’ve at least got some orders,_ I thought. _The rest of us just have to make it up as we go._

Leaving the infomorphs behind had been the right call, then. We were going to need to speak to someone higher up, and soon, before the military started committing genocide. But how to get in touch without exposing them? One idea presented itself- “Hey, look, are you guys organizing volunteers? There’s a lot of us who’d help out, you know, with recovery or whatever. Could we go somewhere, talk to someone?”

The guy with the pistol looked thoughtful. “We only just got here a couple hours ago, but I know the Colonel’s probably headed all the way downtown at top speed. He was moving like someone had lit a fire under him, earlier. You go talk to people at the checkpoints they’re going to set up, I’m sure they could organize you.” I thanked him, and got back in the truck.

 _Alright, so once we reconvene with Haley, two new objectives. One: don’t go anywhere near downtown with magic or infomorphs apparent. Get a message to them and offer to translate. Two: set up our new refuge_ away _from downtown, preferably far enough away to avoid any and all checkpoints._ I wasn’t sure that _they_ knew what their objectives were. And until they had a handle on the… _reality_ of our new situation, I didn’t want a lot of young guys with guns looking over our shoulder. _Maybe I should have signed on with those bunker survivalists._

I grabbed Delmutt and we moved on down the road. Final stop for the day- my house.

\---

Well, the place was still standing. _Can’t say the same for all of the neighborhood._ Two in the suburb had burned, that I could see. Lots of boarded windows and doors, in the two days since we’d left. And… bodies. All down the streets, they’d dragged infomorph bodies to the curbs. Just piled in heaps where we used to put out the trash. Flies weren’t accumulating- the biologies were too different- but it was a nauseating sight. _They didn’t leave a single one alive, did they_. Suddenly I was feeling a lot better about Haley and Amy’s midnight ride. Delmutt felt it, too. She was staring out the windows as we rode on. “If you hadn’t warned me… I would be dead in the street now. Is this what your people do? Is this why you are so worried?”

I kept looking ahead as I drove. “Humans… we’re animals, in the end. We’ve got all this civilization, but you take us out of our comfort zone and the scripts and routines of daily life, and most of us are just apes. They’ve got to recognize you as people before socialization kicks in, stays their hands.”

She nodded. “We would have tried to talk. Few would have fought, or offered any threat. All these bodies- these _were_ just people, scared and lost. Anyone could have seen it. It did not seem so bad on the first night, even during the panic. I think that most of this happened after.”

Sherriff spoke in the back of my head. “ _ <Naive girl. We are. Violent, too. But not like this.>” _

I worried that he might be right. We pulled up to the house. Robin’s egg blue, windows and doors still unbroken. The cat was hanging out on the front porch- he ran to me when we pulled up, being unusually friendly. “Guess you don’t like going two days without central air and a food bowl, huh?” I let him in, then turned to the driveway where Amy was hurrying up. “Hey! Good to see you. You doing okay here?”

“ _No I am not doing okay”_ she hissed. _“We need to get off the street right now_.” She gestured at the four infomorphs, and I took her meaning. We all filed inside, and got comfortable in the living room. I had Delmutt take a position by the front windows with instructions to call for us if anyone drove by. We were at the end of a cul-de-sac so traffic _should_ have been light, but I was paranoid now. Amy was a bit surprised when I re-introduced her to Miss D. “Weren’t you a mantis two days ago?”

Delmutt wagged her wings ambivalently, not breaking line of sight to the street. “Only my vessel. I traded. What has happened here?”

Amy sighed and passed a hand through her hair. “It’s a nightmare. After all of you left, I thought we were done. The flyers were helping, people were settling down. Not everyone, but… enough. We were coping. It lasted a day. Then the _army_ showed up, at dawn.” She made a dismissive hand motion, a gesture of contempt. “They wanted all of the infomorphs in trucks. Wanted to take them somewhere. They- they shot a few, who didn’t understand what was happening. Who tried to run. Everyone on the street saw it.” I could see tears forming in her eyes. “I thought we would hide the rest, keep them indoors, but- they started going house to house. Just shoving in, shooting or grabbing the informorphs, leaving.” She sat down. “Then. I saw doors open up along the street. People started… pushing them out. Just like that.”

I could see it in my mind. Alongside the fresh image of a man bleeding out through his nose. _Sherriff, how do you do it?_ “Behold the extent of human mercy, I guess.” We sat in silence for awhile. Delmutt translated for the other three, and I could see tension running through them. _Don’t blame you, guys._ “I’m sorry Amy. A lot of them _did_ make it out though. They’re at the stadium. It wasn’t all for nothing, and there _are_ humans there, helping.”

She sniffled. “Thanks. It’s good that we helped. I just… I thought we were _better_ than this. They didn’t do _anything_ to us. I’d… I’d go with you, if I could. If my daughter-” she looked at me desperately, pleading for some kind of absolution I couldn’t give.

I gave her the world’s most awkward hug-and-pat. “I know you would. You just keep your family safe. Take anything in this house, if you need it. We won’t be coming back, maybe ever.”

We scooped up phones and laptops and chargers, I changed my bandages, and I picked up the knitting that Haley had been working on. Maybe she’d find time again, some day. And the cat, of course. He was reluctant to be parted from his food dish so soon. “Come on, you little dead weight. Coyotes will have to wait another day.” Last but not least, I scooped all of my Pathfinder books from the floor of the living room into a bag. _Now_ **_these_ ** _should come in handy._ As we left for the truck, Amy stopped me.

“They know. Some people gave them copies of the flyers. They know about the stadium, and that you can speak to them.”

_The convoy._

That group that passed us hadn’t been going to the city center. Or at least, not there _first. One right turn, they’ll be at the stadium._ It wasn’t big enough to haul away that many infomorphs, but it was big enough to start shooting them, if things went south. _But they do speak English now. Enough of them do. And they didn’t want our help._ **_Can_ ** _we interfere? Even when she promised not to?_

Sherriff was emphatic, in my head. < _Can. Must. Don’t let them. Stack more bodies. > _

He was right. We had to get back.


	14. Chapter 14

We made the drive back to the Stadium in relative silence. Everyone in the truck was feeling the tension of the moment. Delmutt gripped her pistol tight, while Yakko, Wacko, and Dot stared out the windows in all directions. For my part, my grip on the steering wheel was white knuckled, enough to set the wounds in my arms aching again. _If Haley beats us back, tries to resist the army…_ I wouldn’t finish the thought. I _knew_ she was the hero. _But she’s not invincible_.

I decided to correct another mistake I’d made earlier. “Delmutt, what are the names of our three soldiers? I never asked, and I should have. I’m sorry.”

She conferred with them. Their names didn’t _strictly_ translate, without the weird English mapping that Sheriff had received on implantation into my head. But they could come up with a phonetic equivalent. And I would _not_ leave any of my people nameless in my mind, before a potential confrontation. After some debate, they settled on Ayen, Larmutt, and Dainbex. Always two syllables, I noted. A surname system? I could work with that.

We screeched into the stadium in what felt, to me, like record time. The sun was beginning to set, and I could already see the armored vehicles of the Guard convoy parked around the front gates. Several humans were out, engaging with the soldiers. I didn’t see any infomorphs loading into trucks yet. _Good, still time._ Several soldiers turned and covered us with weapons as we pulled up. I considered briefly having the four disarm, but decided against it. _They already consider them deadly threats. Guns may give them a moment’s chance, if it comes to it._ But we got out with weapons at rest, for the time being.

How many armed, life-or-death confrontations had I been in, in the last three days? _The police, the Jabberwock, the gun store._ I was starting to feel somewhat apathetic about men pointing guns at me, and that was an attitude I needed to correct immediately. This was _dangerous_. These men were all professional soldiers, and they had firepower on those armored turrets that could kill my crew and even Haley in seconds, if it came to that. _For now._ We had to find some way to send these men off, for at least a few more days. Until that power ramp got us high enough that they couldn’t credibly threaten her anymore. _Then we can dictate terms._

Three men were shouting at us, ordering us to lay on the ground, drop our guns, and so on. I had no intention of doing any of that. I ordered the other four to stay behind at the truck, for whatever cover it offered. I kept my hands out to my side, and walked forward slowly. They didn’t shoot me- seemed reluctant to kill a human, for the time being. _Good. Bet that’ll change, before too long._ I called out. “Take me to your leader? Heh.”

They weren’t buying it. “Shut the fuck up and get on the ground _now_ or _I will shoot you dead,_ sir.” I smiled a bit at that incongruous _sir_. The others at the stadium had noticed our confrontation, now, and were making further noise at the guards still arguing with them.

I shook my head and kept walking towards them. “Can’t do that, man. You haven’t shot any humans yet, and I’ve got to talk to your boss to keep you from shooting any of the aliens. I’ve got a plan that lets us all walk away tonight without blood on our hands.” Not… _strictly_ true, but I was good at improvisation. _Think think think._ “Besides, you really don’t want to kill me. I have a feeling the second you really threaten me, my wife’s going to drop in, and she’s about two thousand pounds of scales and teeth these days. You guys can’t have missed that magic is real, right? Any of you been to downtown, yet?”

That gave them pause. So maybe they’d heard rumors, at least. One of them lowered his rifle fractionally. “I recognize your voice. You the guy from those radio broadcasts?”

I put on my friendliest smile and nodded. “Good ear!” _Say something in infomorph, Sherriff. “ <Screw. Your. Stupid species.>” _They started at the unfamiliar noises, then calmed down a bit more. _Situation defused?_

The man in charge of this clusterfuck, standing over with the stadium crowd, walked towards us. Looked like a captain, if I was reading his bars correctly. I decided to get my name out there. “Captain… Kitchener, is it? Sean McCarthy. Really need to talk to you.”

He nodded but did not move past the three armed men. I noticed, behind him, that one of the APC’s had swiveled its turret around to cover the truck. _Oh that’s not a good sign._ But he offered no other sign of violence in the moment. He was tall, and a bit gaunt, and looked like he’d had a _really_ shit couple of days, but he didn’t look bloodthirsty. He introduced himself. “Captain Roy Kitchener. If you can speak to these things, we could use your help.”

 _Be agreeable, Sean._ “I can, and they’re not _things_ , they’re just people. They were swapped to our earth, two days ago, and they’re trying to stay alive. We set the stadium up as a refugee camp. In another few weeks my wife will have the resources to take care of them, and maybe set some of this right. I saw what happened… what you did in Blackwood.” He winced, at that. _Must be weighing on his conscience, then._ “I won’t help you carry that out here. I’d rather die.”

He crossed his arms. _Feeling a bit defensive, captain?_ “This is an emergency situation. Whatever these… _people_ are, they’re not _safe._ Cities are blacking out all over the country. This is the biggest concentration in Midland, and we’ve been ordered to move them to camps down south. You can make that go a lot easier if you talk to them. Or you can get in the way, and get a lot of them killed. Your call.”

I gestured sharply in negation with one hand. The three covering me with their weapons shuffled a bit nervously. “It’s _not_ my call, it’s theirs. And you aren’t in possession of all the _facts,_ Captain. Have you done any recon downtown? Interviewed any locals?” I could see by the look on his face that he had. He knew what I was getting at. “Then you know about the threat that almost blacked out _this_ city, yesterday. My wife and I stopped it. It has nothing to do with these people.”

He looked uneasy, but not convinced. “We’ve had hundreds of similar reports from downtown but I’m going to need a lot more than _rumor_ to believe that magic talking animals tried to _burn_ everyone to death, or that _you_ stopped them. You got any proof?” _Haley’s got the sword_ , _damn._

But I could hear a heavy _flap flap flap_ coming through the twilight sky. I smiled unpleasantly at him. “Yeah, I think I do. Try not to shoot it when it lands.”

 _Two_ dragons set down behind me, obscuring line of sight to the truck. Haley was looking a bit bigger- it had only been half a day, but her growth rate was ludicrous. She was easily larger than a horse, by now. She was also injured- really favoring her right side, where it looked like she’d been shot by something and bled quite a bit. Well, join the club- being shot was all the rage now. Still my heart skipped to see my wife injured. Next to her was the real surprise, from my perspective. A much _bigger_ dragon, with a totally different look to it- much more lumbering and barrel chested than the more catlike features that Haley’s form had taken. It was easily bigger than the truck- maybe bigger than one of the armored personnel carriers. It had an almost childlike expression on its face, though- full of curiosity and maybe a little fear at all the men with guns. It opened its mouth and spoke- “Hey! That was a pretty good landing, right?” It was the voice of a young girl.

That helped defuse the tension somewhat but there were still a _lot_ of guns pointing in this direction all of a sudden. Haley walked around her side. “Yeah Skylar, you’ve really improved. Let me talk to these men for a minute, okay? Then we’ll find something to eat.” She made her way over to my side, not quite _looming_ but certainly radiating an aura of… displeasure. I hugged her around the neck and then turned back to my conversation with the men in uniform. They’d backed up a step or two in the face of all of this, but remained remarkably composed.

Their captain spoke first, eyeballing that wound in her side. “You’d uh, you’d be his _wife,_ then?”

She sighed. “Yes. As I’m getting _really_ tired of repeating to people- magic is real, I got turned into a dragon at the same time as all the rest of this madness, and there are more people out there with stranger powers than I have. Some of them were just trying to hunt me. I’m _really_ hoping we got away.”

The captain passed a hand over his face. It _had_ been a long day, I knew the feeling. “Sir, miss, you and… _all_ of your friends need to come with me. We’ll drive you back to the main camp, and-”

Haley shook her head emphatically _no,_ causing spines and fins to sway haphazardly. “Uh-uh. We need to stay mobile. Captain, you don’t understand what’s coming yet. You can’t go pinning all these people up, even if you don’t mean to kill them. You’re just making them a bigger target for whatever comes next. Plus, I kind of think you _do_ mean to kill them.” I nodded in agreement with this last bit. I hadn’t seen anything to convince me of the good intentions of these people.

But… my confidence was starting to fade. “Haley, they’ve got a lot of guns, and we’re not bulletproof. They killed all the infomorphs in our neighborhood, stacked them by the _curbs,_ honey. Let’s just back off, regroup, and see if we can talk to someone higher up tomorrow.” At this point I’d had enough of being shot at and seeing my wife hurt. I wanted _out,_ I wanted downtime. They already had control of the stadium and nothing we did here could change that without adding enormously to the body count and making an enemy we couldn’t afford.

She didn’t acknowledge me. Her eyes and the captain’s were locked. He said, slowly. “Blackwood was… a mistake. I understand your objection and I promise you nobody’s going to die here unless they offer a threat to my people. But they _are_ coming with me. So are you. This isn’t negotiable. If you really are trying to help the most people, we are in the position to do that. We need your translations, but we also need to understand this… magic. We can’t do that if you’re running around.” _Translation: you’re dangerous_. He held up one hand, and the _second APC_ swivelled its turret in our direction. “Ma’am I do not want to injure you but force is the only coercion I have, right now. My orders are to capture what I don’t understand, and kill it if it resists. Your group meets all those parameters. I _will_ lay down my life if that is what it takes to keep this city safe. Stand down, and prove to us that you are not the threat we fear.”

Compelling. Haley didn’t buy it. “Captain, I’m not sure you are _capable_ of killing me. This hole in my hide was made by a _magic arrow_ fired from a bow summoned, as far as I could tell, by a _literal incarnation of God_. Your guns are a _complication_. They are not the monopoly on force that you are used to. I will _cooperate_ with you, from a position of security, so I can help stop the _other_ threats. But I cannot put myself in a cage for you. And if you try to imprison my friends or family, I will _fight_ you. Nobody here has offered violence to anyone in the last two days.” I cringed at that. _We have some catching up to do, honey._ “They’re just trying to survive. If you are intent on imprisoning them, _you_ are the force that we have to resist.”

I looked back and forth between them. _No give in either direction._ This was it, then- this was the showdown. She was forcing it _too early_. We didn’t have the firepower on our side. We had the weight of the lives we wanted to save, but we were all hurt, tired, and flat footed against fresh soldiers. The new dragon was an unknown- _why does it sound like a little girl-_ and frankly, my courage was failing. I didn’t want to die, in a _parking lot,_ because I’d tried to brazen it out against men with guns for the second time in a day. I walked to Haley and put a hand on her neck. “Haley, wife whom I love. Universal advocate calling. Hang it up.”

She gave me a heartbroken look. Like I’d betrayed her. “Sean we _can’t,_ all these people, I-”

I put a finger up to her lips. “We’re not abandoning them. We stay here, we fight, we _will_ die. We are not invulnerable. You _might_ be. What else are you willing to give up?” I swept my gaze across the other dragon, the truck with the informorphs. “We can’t fight this battle, honey. Walk away while it’s still peaceful and find another angle.”

The captain put a hand on his holstered pistol. “I’m not really comfortable with the two of you arguing about whether you can _take_ us, right here in front of me. Walking away is not an option- I’m ending this conversation. Surrender or we open fire. Your choice.” _Thanks, asshole, way to turn up the pressure._

She looked back and forth, me to the captain. She seemed torn. _Make the right call._ Something settled in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to speak-

A shot rang out.

It wasn’t us- wrong direction. It came from the north-east _,_ the direction Haley had come. One of the men covering us dropped with a yelp, a bloom of crimson from his back. All hell broke loose.

A loose collection of men in black camo, body armor and face masks were blitzing across the vast stadium lot towards us, riding on 4-wheeled vehicles. They had their rifles levelled and were already firing. I saw at least one shot _spang_ off of Haley’s breastbone and ducked to put her between myself and the fire- cowardly, but _she_ was at least partially bulletproof. Many of their other shots began to tell. Guardsmen were dropping, some to get prone and return fire, others simply from hits taken. One of the APC turrets began to turn, before a _streak_ of white fire, like a spear of light, leapt from a tube on the shoulder of one of the men and _obliterated_ it. One second a vehicle was there, the next an expanding fireball above a set of heavy wheels. The detonation was fifty feet away from me but the heat was scorching, and the _sound_ of it threw me down. _Who the fuck_ **_are_ ** _these guys?_

The remaining APC opened up- in the wrong direction. I didn’t know if they assumed we were all working together, or they just panicked, or what. A line of 20mm tracers slammed out, tearing chunks from the pavement and blasting three neat quarter-sized holes through Haley’s chest and left side. Blood gouted, splashed my face and obscured my vision. She _roared,_ the feeling shook my bones and rattled my already abused eardrums, and let out a white-hot lance of her own, easily covering the gap to the vehicle. It didn’t quite detonate the APC the way that missile launcher had, but it took that barrel out of action, and her fire was joined seconds later by a much heavier stream of some kind of acidic bile from the bigger dragon. _That_ put a pretty decisive end to it, which was good because Haley was already collapsing.

The infomorphs at the truck were in good cover and returning fire towards the special forces raiders. The big dragon didn’t _seem_ to be under fire by the men in black, interestingly, and whatever shots the Guard were taking at her didn’t seem to interest her at all. She was looking at Haley’s collapsed form, and me, paralyzed with anxiety. “What do we _do?”_ she wailed.

Ignoring the _cracks_ of rifle fire still sounding close, on the verge of panic myself, I knelt down and spoke into Haley’s ear. “Come on baby, come on, don’t pass out on me here. You’ve got to shrink down honey, you’ve got to get small so we can get you away. Help me Haley, don’t die on me here, not now please honey,” just babbling. She had a far-off look in her eyes, but some part of her heard me, and she started to _shift_. Unfortunately for me, she was still my cover. As she shrank the crack of rifle fire sounded closer. I huddled close to the ground and waited. Within seconds she was a small golden ferret of some kind, and the shredded portions of the round that had not exited cleanly earlier _tinkled_ to the ground next to her, ejected from her shrinking body. I scooped her in my hands, trying to hold her wounds closed with just the pressure of my fingers, and turned to run for the truck.

Another _crack_ and I felt the strength go out of my right leg. There wasn’t even any pain. I stumbled forward with a shouted “No!” and reached out with my free hand towards the truck. It was absurd, it wasn’t even _safe_ over there, if I made it chances were another one of those missiles would do for us anyway, but it _felt_ like the gap between us and them was a hundred miles of no man’s land. The chaos continued around us.

Distantly I heard the guy- I presumed the one who’d shot me- shouting. “For O’Dim! For the Tower! For-” he cut off, jerking back as a shot from the infomorphs caught him in the neck. I pulled myself forward one handed, pushing with my good leg. I couldn’t get any movement from the bad one. All I was registering _there_ was heat and wetness. Things were starting to fade but I wouldn’t let Haley go. _I_ was the cover now, sheltering her with my body, even if I couldn’t move. I held her close. “I’m sorry honey, I- I’m sorry. I love you.”

Haley’s friend, the bigger dragon, finally came to some kind of decision. “This is wrong. This is _all wrong!”_ She stood up and got between me, and the incoming fire. A couple of bullets _whanged_ off her before they stopped. She grabbed me up in her mouth and threw me over her shoulder. “This isn’t how it should be! He said we were bringing peace!” With a _woosh_ she leapt off the ground and beat her wings, and we were airborne. She called something down to the infomorphs as we flew overhead, but I couldn’t hear. I kept my grip locked tight on Haley’s body as the world went grey and I _slept-_

\---

??? later

\---

And awoke, in pain, on a makeshift operating table. A man was standing over me with blood on his hands, nearly up to the elbow, and my leg was on _fire_. I didn’t care. I grabbed his arm with one hand and shouted her name- but I couldn’t hear myself. He calmly detached my hand from its death grip, and pushed me back down on the table. I recognized him- it was Kevin, the EMT from the stadium- _patching me up for the second time in a day, but how did he get- wherever we are?_ I didn’t have much time to question. He was doing something in my leg and the pain made everything go _white_ and I _slept-_

\---

I was standing on a grey plateau, looking out over a vast prairie. Storm clouds rolled overhead. I recognized this- this was the scene I’d discovered when I first shared Sherriff’s head. I could see the tracks his coterie wagon had made, smashing down the grass as he went. Was I really here?

“Couldn’t rightly tell ya,” said the voice behind me, and I realized I had asked my question out loud. “I’m not so sure I’m real, myself.” It was Sherriff. I turned around and saw him, in the flesh- or, I guess, carapace. He was wearing the vessel I guessed he was most comfortable in- a small, wiry soldier with a pair of six guns strapped to his upper thorax. He had a small piece of feeler grass in his mandibles, chewing it like a straw. “One minute I’m riding your head, the next- _poof_ ”

I turned back. The storm would break over this area soon. I could see what passed for trees on this world bending before the wind and rain, down on the prairie. Animals were leaving ripples in the tall grass as they ran for cover. It was stark, and harsh, and alien and beautiful. “I wonder if humans can live here,” I said, just for something to say. It felt _weird_ not to have him in my head.

“The way you suckers fight I expect you’d find a way to live most anywhere. Amazing you can live around _each other,_ though.” Sherriff sat down on the ground, watching the storm. “I’d say we should get to cover soon, but- I kinda wonder if this isn’t all just metaphorical.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t associate anything with this imagery. And this place has moved on in time since you were up here. I think we’re _here,_ now, for whatever reason. The ultimate out of body experience. I’m not going to wait for the rain to hit, in any case.”

He eyed me and I knew what he was thinking. _If he’s tethered to me and he rode me here- what happens if I go back? Or_ **_never_ ** _go back?_ I turned my back on him anyway. “I trust you, Sherriff. Whatever else you are, you’re an honorable person. I’d give my life to save yours, they’re one and the same, but-”

I heard him rustle to stand beside me. “But it’s not our life we’re fighting for tonight. I won’t leave miss Haley in the lurch, you have my word on that.”

“But now we know- it’s _possible_ to get here. It just may require death to do it.”

“So who has to die to get us back?”

I felt a _tug_ deep in my guts. “Neither, I think- _hang on-”_ the lightning of the storm _flashed,_ like every bolt unloaded at once, and the world went _white_ and I _woke up-_

_\---_

It was morning and the light through the window had hit my eyes, waking me. I was in the VIP box of the stadium, our home for the last two nights. _Well, that explains Kevin_. I tried to sit up and nearly passed out again. _I must have lost a ton of blood_. My right leg ached- _all_ of me ached, but it hurt more than the burns and cuts combined. I couldn’t see it from my prone position, but I could _feel_ it. Like a hot iron rod had been inserted into my upper thigh, all the way through the bone. _If that didn’t hit an artery I’m the luckiest son of a bitch on earth._ I couldn’t feel the toes of that leg but I could see them wiggle.

I called out. “Haley? Anyone?”

She was right there, at my side. She was a dragon again- her whole chest and left side were bandages and gauze pads. I’d _seen_ her get chunks blown out of her, just minutes ago in my recollection, and she was already mobile. _That hit point system you are made of now is absolutely bullshit, darling._ She put one enormous paw on my arm and leaned in. “I’m here Sean. You’re okay. You saved me.” She planted a kiss on my forehead. The heat of her presence was painful now. “You were so brave.”

I’d never been good at maudlin. I ignored the heat, reached up and held her face, awkwardly. “I’m not the one who served as a sandbag barricade last night and is already up and about.”

She winced a little, reminded of her own damage. “I was just thinking yesterday that I’m taking more damage than I can sustain. But it… hurts less than you’d think. I heal so fast, now, especially once I get up and contribute with my own skills. If our math is right I should be able to cast spells by this afternoon, and then I can repair… some of this, almost instantly.” She sat back.

We had too many important things to cover but I couldn’t think of any of them in that moment. All that was going through my head was one phrase, over and over. “Never again. I can’t lose you like that.”

She put her head down, refusing to meet my eyes. “Yes, again. And again and again. I won’t put you in danger like that a seco-” she reconsidered- “a _third_ time. But things are scary now. Violent. I didn’t pick the fight last night, but I was about to pick _some_ fight. Whatever it takes, to save the world.” I felt the resolve in her voice, the sadness and determination.

“I killed two men yesterday, Haley. They shot first. But they shouldn’t have been shooting at _all._ Because I didn’t look before I leapt.” She opened her eyes at that. _It’s not just you having adventures, learning lessons out there, honey._ “You know I believe in you. But- but you weren’t _ready_ last night, and we have to be more cautious. We can’t keep running in. If you’d died last night and I figured out later a way I could have _prevented_ it, I- I couldn’t have lived with that. If you want my help, you have to compromise here. You’re a rational heroine, so make a plan. No more rushing in.”

She hesitated, but nodded silently. I sighed. “Look, let’s not make promises we don’t intend to keep.”

She laughed. “It feels like only yesterday, I was the one in this room having a crisis of confidence, and you were the one telling me I could do anything.”

Still laying down, I crossed my arms and glared at her. “It _was_ yesterday. Well. Day before yesterday. You _can_ do anything, but our enemies are getting stronger too and-” I cut myself off, I wasn’t going to browbeat her. “We’ll talk about this later. Find something that works for both of us.” I asked the other burning question,“Did everyone else make it out okay? What happened with the-”

She held up a paw and ticked points off. “The infomorphs who left with you are fine. Skylar- that’s my dragon friend- told them to run away and come back later. She flew you and I over the stadium wall and landed on the field, where they took us both to triage. Luckily the infomorphs have some _very_ good vets, given all their varied biologies, and like I said- my damage was not really as bad as it looked. I’ll heal. _You_ , on the other hand- your right femur is shattered, you have nerve damage, and the bullet nicked your artery on the way in. You are... very lucky to be alive.” Her voice hitched. I knew she was trying to be professional but I’d scared her just as badly as she’d scared me.

She continued. “The National Guard took heavy losses but the raiders lost interest as soon as we were in the stadium, out of immediate reach. I- they had no insignia, Sean, but those men were _professionals_. Special operations, commandos, whatever you want to call them. They didn’t even leave _bodies_ behind. Skylar said that Aslan picked them up in Israel. There was a man with him when I met him in the woods, a guy in black- he sent chills up my spine. If he has more of those men, I don’t know-”

I held up a hand to forestall her and did my best Joe Friday impression. “Just the facts, ma’am.” I think I came closer to death by incineration in that moment than I ever had before.

“If you even _think_ about criticizing me for being _emotional_ I swear-” she got ahold of herself, continued. “ _Ahem_. The Guard fought them off, but withdrew from the stadium to get medical attention of their own. They will be back within hours, and then they’re going to try to take us into custody. The stadium can’t evacuate in time, but several of their leaders have asked us for help, now that they see what we’re up against, and now that Delmutt has told them what happened in Blackwood.” She hesitated, then burst again. “We’ve got to find somewhere to _go,_ and get _ready,_ and then we have to rescue all these people, and stop _an angry god and an army of special forces before they kill everyone_. Sean I just don’t know-”  
I held up my hand a second time. “Not to worry, my dear. I happen to know the location of a _bunker._ And I have a _cunning plan._ ”


	15. Chapter 15

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t really _move_. Blood loss, combined with a broken femur and all of my cuts and burns catching up to me, meant that I was weak as a kitten for the time being. Haley might have some kind of berserker constitution, but I was still very very human.

Kevin refused to participate in moving me again, either. “If I give you some way to get out of here you’re going to go right back out and get yourself killed. I am _not_ your doctor but I won’t help you kill yourself.”

I was feeling a little funnier, at least. “You can say that all you want, but you’ll always be my Leonard McCoy. Thanks for saving my life, doc. Also, if I stay here I’m probably dead anyway when the army rolls back up. If you find me a wheelchair I promise not to enter any armed standoffs for at least three days.” He glared, but he knew as well as I did that I was right about the army. None of the infomorphs were leaving- where would they go? But the humans scattered around the refugee camp were increasingly nervous. Kevin wandered off, hopefully to go find me some wheels, and the rest of the gang gathered around.

I shook Delmutt’s hand-claw-thing. She’d swapped back to the mantis, overnight. “I’m glad you’re okay, miss D. The rest of you too.” Ayen, Larmutt, and Dainbex all nodded glumly behind her. _Bet you’re regretting signing up now, eh?_ “And, uh, Skylar, was it? Thank _you_ , most of all. You saved all of us last night.”

The dragon-girl, poking her head in from the much larger hallway outside the VIP box, looked abashed. “It was the right thing to do.”

Haley smiled at her. “It was, and it was very brave of you to do it. Whatever Aslan saw that made him put you in that body, he was _wrong_. You’re an incredible girl.” _Guess dragons can blush a little bit after all._ We all kind of took that spectacle in for a moment, before Delmutt gave a start.

“Oh yeah! _How’d you turn into a dragon? Gimme.”_ She raced over the big lizard and began peppering her with questions. The girl seemed bemused but I tuned them out before I heard the answers.

“Okay, everyone who’s _left_ , we need to make plans. What I’d _like_ to do is sit here on my butt until our resident superhero gets Cure Light Wounds, but I think time is pressing on us a bit. We have three priorities. Haley?”

She was downshifting to her human form to make more space in the box, the Lara Croft cosplay outfit reasserting itself. And the vorpal sword, I noted. _Glad that’s still around_. She ticked points off on her fingers. “Number one: we need to escape the cordon that’s about to close on this place. Number two: we need a place to hunker down and prepare whatever Sean’s ‘Cunning plan’ is. Number three: we need a way to keep in touch with the stadium refugees and rescue them when the time is right.”

I waved my left hand at her until she took it and held it. Human contact was kind of rare for us these days, I wanted her to have more of it. Said nothing about me, no _sir._ “She’s got it. Now, number one is simple. We just move out before they get here. Number two, I’ve got solved, I hope. I met some folks yesterday with a bunker out in the country. They gave me the address.”

Skylar spoke up, over Miss D’s continued pestering. _Guess she’s got those draconic senses too._ “Won’t they be using it?”

I leaned my head back. “No, they… didn’t make it, yesterday. One of them did. I’m hoping he got to a hospital.” There was a bit of silence after that. It was hard to process, all the chaos that we’d been through. Any pause risked letting it crash down on us. “Anyway. That’s number two. Number three, I’m up for suggestions.”

Delmutt translated for the other three, while Skylar and Haley thought a bit. Finally Haley perked up. “The phones!”

Ah, true, we did have a few of those. And they wouldn’t be able to search ten thousand or more infomorphs before they processed them, not _thoroughly._ I thought about it. “We hide a phone among them, then call it or use the GPS to track their movements. Assuming the networks and power hold out. If the Guard’s in control, I imagine they should. Yeah, that keeps us in touch. Now how do we rescue them if something goes wrong before my plan can be executed?”

Haley frowned in thought. “Well, we can’t know for sure until we know where they _are_. But… I had Detect Evil running last night, as well as Sense Motive. Some of my skills are getting a little nuts- I felt like I could almost read Captain Kitchener’s mind, by the end. He was sincere that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. Whatever happened in Blackwood I don’t think it was under his complete control. But he was also telling the truth about shooting first, if we resisted. I think… the only way to keep everyone safe right now, is to _not resist_. If he sees they can be non-violent, it might open up a path to talk him around towards our side.”

Delmutt didn’t like it. “So we don’t leave any guns? We give them nothing to defend themselves with but a, a _phone_ and a promise?”

I agreed with Haley, but it was Sherriff who spoke through me. _“ <You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen in Sean’s memory, Delmutt. The _weapons _they can make. They could wipe this whole place out in the blink of an eye, if it came to it. Putting a gun in every hand in here wouldn’t make a difference on that scale. We have to change their minds. >” _

The trio behind Delmutt spoke among themselves in low tones, then to her. She clacked her mandibles angrily at them, but finally translated back to the rest of us. “They say they will stay behind, and keep the phones, and organize resistance. I think this is a terrible idea and you’ll get everyone staying here killed. We _saw_ what humans did to us, in Blackwood. Maybe that didn’t have such an impact for you, maybe you can trust their _intentions,_ but-”

I held up a hand. “All of this is contingent on my plan not being enough in the first place, miss D. Trust me, it’s a great plan. Absolutely going to work.”

Skylar piped up from across the room, “Oh yeah! So what is it?”

I was about to explain when Kevin elbowed his way past her, with a wheelchair. My savior! There followed a relatively short struggle to get me sitting upright in the thing, aided in no small part by my wife the hulking amazon woman with strength somewhere between ‘Horse’ and ‘Grizzly Bear.’ She was surprisingly gentle, for all that. But by the time we were done I was still feeling awfully faint. Then Skylar and Haley both perked their ears up and glanced toward the ceiling.

A few tense seconds later, the rest of us heard it. Kevin called it: “Helicopters.” More than one, approaching fast from the south. Our window for escape without a confrontation was closing.

Things moved a bit too quickly for my addled brain to really process. Ayen, Larm, and Dain got a quick primer on mobile-phone use, and a send off from the rest of us with instructions to follow. Skylar and Delmutt ran out into the stadium, heading to the parking lot and the truck- to get it ready, or in an absolute emergency, to physically carry it away- Skylar was _reasonably_ sure she could pick it up. Haley busied herself scooping her miniature hoard of gold and jewelry into a series of canvas sacks that the infomorphs had made her, and slinging them over her shoulders. There had to be at _least_ a hundred pounds of metal in there, and she slung it like a day-bag. I made a mental note not to squeeze her too tight any time soon, she might squeeze back.

We were out on the deck-slash-hall, heading to the stairs, when Skylar came winging up in a rush, Delmutt clinging to her back. “They’re here, we’re too late!” The group trundled over to the edge of the deck and looked through the partially-enclosed scaffolding down into the lot. Sure enough, a convoy of armored trucks- a _lot_ more than the day before- was pulling in. Overhead I could see at least two of the helicopters that I pretty much always thought of as “Black Hawks” even though that was almost _definitely_ not their actual name. At the front and back of the convoy were actual, honest-to-god tanks. They had moved with some speed, and I could see the pavement of the highway off-ramp that had been partially devastated by their presence.

My head was swimming with all the motion, but I tried to call the group to order. “Okay, new plan- jolly cooperation, but we keep Haley out of sight somewhere in the building-” there was a not-so-subtle _ahem_ that I couldn’t place to any of our group. I looked around, puzzled. Kevin, Haley, Delmutt, Skylar, _me…_ there was a new face in our midst, literally forming _out_ of mist. First it was just the extended smile of canine teeth, floating in mid-air, but they were quickly obscured by the head and body of a large hound. It was blue-and-black striped, and _big_ , and looking about with a disdainful intelligence completely at odds with the doofy grin I _expected_ to see on a dog’s face.

I groaned. “Wiltshire Dog, I presume. We’re full up on madness at the moment, could you check back later?”

It sniffed me, as though I were something particularly distasteful, then turned to Haley and spoke in a rumbling masculine baritone. “I see the latest fashion in _husbands_ is as gauche now as it was in my day. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to trade up? I found a lovely piece of roadkill on the way in here.”

I couldn’t take that lying down, or sitting, as it happened. “You sure you couldn’t send one of your other friends? Really been wanting to meet the Sussex Llama and the Dorset Giraffe.”

Haley held up hands, placatingly. “Both of you quit it. This is a crisis. Cecilia, I’m assuming you’ve been following long enough to know what’s happening. Why speak up now?”

The Dog shook itself a little, one of those nose-to-tail waves that I’d always thought looked _immensely_ satisfying. “Just call me Dog, please, Cecilia isn’t _in_ at the moment. I find myself without many places to _go,_ these days, and I thought sleeping under a _bridge_ somewhere was living a bit too rough even for someone of my… furry disposition. I… _happened_ to be in the area, and heard your dilemma. I thought I might be able to help.” Though his voice was low and even, there was an undertone of fast-talking desperation to it. I could understand the anxiety- we hadn’t parted on the best of terms. He must really be in hard straits to come to us now.

I pointed this out. “When you last saw us, you tried to _burn me to death._ Along with the entire population of downtown Midland.” The Dog’s tail drooped a little and it hung its head, like I was shaming an _actual_ dog. I must have been _programmed_ to respond to it, because my tone shifted a bit even as I recognized it was playing me. “But circumstances make strange bedfellows, I guess. Can you help us out of here? Pull us into Wonderland, or something?”

It perked up slightly. “No, there is a… _veil_ , I suppose you would call it, between me and that place. I was drawn from there, and I can draw from there, or send your minds to it, but cannot move between this world and that one freely. But I have _other_ abilities, as you have seen. I believe I have a way. But I would have your answer, first.” It continued to look at Haley.

She shrugged, and squeezed my shoulder. “What else can we say? Of course.”

Kevin held up his hands and stepped back. “Nope, no, sorry, not interested in this, talking invisible dogs is where I draw the line. I’ll take my chances with the army.”

Haley nodded at him. “Thank you for everything, from both of us.” She took over the wheelchair handling. The bags slung over her shoulder clinked and bumped against my head. “Look after the cat for us, okay? It’s still in the VIP room. Take it with you if they move you, we’ll pick it up off your hands as soon as we can.” He grimaced, but nodded.

I could see the trucks unloading, outside. Armed soldiers were pouring out at all points, presumably securing the perimeter before they ventured inside. We had minutes at best. “So,” I said to the Dog, “What are you pulling out of your hat for _this_ one?”

“Oh no,” said the Dog, grinning. I _assumed_ it was grinning, that or it was about to eat my head. “You quite mistake me for _another_ denizen, dear fellow. No hats here, merely _tales,_ and tails, I suppose. One kind you must _avoid_ stepping upon, and the other you must step _into_.”

We all took a second to track this, but to my surprise was Skylar who got it first. “Oh! You want us to join your story? How do we do that?”

The Dog looked delighted when it realized it had a young girl to befuddle with awful wordplay. “Oh, but you already _are,_ my dear. What _is_ the story of Wonderland but a series of delightful vignettes between a clever little girl and her fantastical, fantabulous animal friends?” He began to walk for the stairs again.

Haley got it. “Why it is _many_ things, Dog! It is a lesson on culture, and a mocking treatise, with a mock _tortoise_ , to boot!” She looked very pleased with herself for this little pun. I groaned, loudly. How was _this_ going to help us? She poked me in the back of the head.

Delmutt voiced my question for me. “Not to be difficult or anything but aren’t they just going to shoot us? How is this helping? I’m confused.”

The Dog rose to the challenge, turning to face her while moonwalking backwards, a truly uncanny feat of canine dexterity. He was clearly getting into this. “In Wonderland _,_ one may come by help in _many_ forms, many of them _quite literal_. What is confusion but a lack of distinction? Being thus confused, it seems, might make one easily _confusable_.” We began to descend, Haley taking time with the chair on every step. The bumps _still_ shook my world.

I heard footsteps rushing up from below. My head was still muddled, and I was _reasonably_ sure the Dog had done nothing. “Well, thanks for nothing, fleabag. You want to talk about literal help? You have literally walked us to our deaths.”

The Dog moonwalked off the stairs and into the air, gliding down alongside me. “ _You_ are not walking _anywhere,_ twenty-first century cowboy. Literalness is itself a relative concept, in literature _,_ where we tread _._ We walk the _littoral_ here, the shore between concept and reality. You are _muddled,_ and so-”

The first soldier on point rounded the corner, rifle at the ready. He swept it over all of us but did not pause, then gave an “All clear” gesture to those on the staircase below him. We froze, perfectly still- even Skylar, so massive she took up three quarters of the wide stadium stairs. He swung right around and stepped carefully by us, followed by the rest of his squad.

The Dog continued his speech, grinning. “And so, being indistinct in your thinking, you become indistinct in your _being_.”

Skylar sighed in wonder. “Invisible. We’re _invisible._ ” We began walking again. There were other soldiers, but they appeared not to hear or see us, instead parting easily as we passed.

Haley was feeling poetic. “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.”

“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome,” said the Dog, shaking its large head. “You can be _vis’d_ quite easily. But so long as we banter, you ride my tale, as it were. They register you as a dream, a fleeting fancy- indeed! A talking dog, a woman with horns, a man in a wheelchair and a mantis riding a _dragon?_ We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Haley laughed, lightly, as we rounded the corridor to the front gate. “You’re mixing your plays.” I understood her joy. _Somehow, this is going to work._ We could see the truck now, through the rumbling mess of the armored convoy, still pulling into position. They appeared to be using the trucks as part of a makeshift barricade around the building. But an opening appeared for us, a truck momentarily pulled aside as we strode out the front gate.

I felt a bit of remorse for my accusation earlier. “I apologize. You really did come through for us. I don’t quite understand _how,_ but I get that my _not_ understanding may be critical, so I’ll try not to question it.”

The Dog faded from sight and reappeared, chihuahua sized, poking a head out of one of Haley’s burlap sacks. “Oh, question as you like, and I’ll give you three answers, each one true and maddening to know.”

We’d reached the truck. The guns were still in the bed, under a tarp. Haley deposited the bulging sacks, and then manhandled me into the passenger’s seat before heading around to the driver’s door. She and Skylar exchanged words- I assumed some instructions- and then she got in and turned the key. Somehow we were really doing this, but I felt a _tug_ to continue our conversation through the back window of the truck. “Okay, taking it _literally_ then. Why are you the Wiltshire Dog? Why the knockoff Cheshire cat routine, why not the actual creature?”

The Dog, still chihuahua sized, leapt through the back window into the middle of the cab bench. “It didn’t fit Cecilia, of course. Whatever paired her with Wonderland, it was her brain doing the calling. She seemed in need of a canny familiar- why not _canis familiaris?_ ‘A dog’s not mad,’ said the cat, most famously. She needed a little sanity. _You_ did not summon Lini the Druid or Seoni the Sorceress for your games, why hold _my_ creator to some higher standard?”

I started at that. “Wait, are you implying that _Haley_ is someone I-” I shared a nervous glance with my wife. “That doesn’t make any sense, we’ve been together for a _decade_ , you’d have to rewrite half our life _story_ to make that fit-”

The Dog just chuckled. “I said nothing of the sort. Now ask your _questions,_ Seeker of Knowledge.”

I cut myself off. “You’re fucking with me on _purpose_. Alright wise guy, you want to do the oracle routine, how’s my ‘Cunning Plan’ going to play out?”

He paused, and peered into the distance silently. Haley pulled the truck onto the highway on-ramp, in the south-easterly direction of our presumed shelter for the night. The dragon-girl, I assume wary of the helicopters still circling over the stadium, crept along behind us. Eventually the dog spoke again, sounding… resigned? “If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take. If you give Luke Skywalker a lightsaber, you must give Darth Vader his Death Star. But it all depends on perspective- who’s the villain, and who’s the victor? The question hangs in the air. Either way, pour out a pint for Guinness- revision did him no favors, in the end.”

Star Wars metaphors? _Really?_ I didn’t phrase my incredulity as a question. “Okay, final answer, all the marbles. Try to spout confusing bullshit about _this_ one. Do you want to join us?” I asked with a smile.

 _Finally_ I caught it off guard. I think it was expecting more barbs, not a genuine invitation. It looked taken aback, then a little sheepish. Haley smiled encouragingly at it. “We _did_ always want to adopt a dog. Don’t worry, we’re all mad here.”

The Dog _harumphed_ and looked away. “Don’t quote scripture at _me_ , young woman.” He paused again, considering. “I’ve only had one master, and _she_ lives in my head. Now I look for shelter, and find _you two_ instead. I suppose I could insist that I was holier than thou. But I find I am agreeable. I’ll be your Dog for now.” With the little ditty, he started to fade again, _skin first_ , and only a dog’s skull still floated between us as he spoke the last line before disappearing entirely.

Haley looked at me as the open highway rolled on before us. Behind, Skylar finally took to the air, looping and circling overhead as we made our way. “I, uh, hmm. Hope he plays well with the cat.”

I sighed. “I hope he doesn’t set the house on fire as a _grooming ritual_. Oh well, I’m glad he’s on the team. I’m going to pass out now, wake me when we get there please.”

\---

“When we get there” turned out to be a couple hours later, mid-morning. Haley shook my arm until I woke up, and Skylar _whumped_ to a landing behind us. We were deep in the heavy woodland that made up most of southern Missouri, at the end of a dirt road with a single postal box. In front of us there was a gate to a large field, and in the middle of that- “Well I’ll be damned,” I said. “It _is_ a bunker.” A literal, honest-to-god low slung concrete monstrosity. It spread out over half the acreage in front of us, full of gun slits and forbidding-looking portholes. The whole thing was painted green and covered in sod, to make it less visible from the air. There was a single iron-banded barn door on one side, big enough to allow a car to enter, unbarred and standing open. There were no signs of habitation beyond still-fresh tire tracks, presumably from the ambushers we’d encountered the day before.

Haley got out of the truck and began shifting back to her draconic form “I’ll check it out, you wait here.” Like I was strong enough to get out if I wanted to. She was _truly_ big now, I saw out in the open. _Large_ in Pathfinder terms was such a weird space- a _medium_ creature was a human, or thereabouts. But a _Large_ creature was anything from one foot taller, to _16 feet tall_. Haley was rapidly approaching the top end of that scale- she stood much higher at the shoulder than a horse now, still not quite rivaling our youngest hanger-on, but getting there. “Skylar, you and Delmutt stay here with the truck. Dog, if you’re here, stick behind me please.” She rolled forward in an easy lope, and I saw the grass of the field part behind her- _something_ was following her, presumably our erstwhile mutt. She stuck her head inside the garage, called out. Eventually she ventured inside, out of sight.

Delmutt walked over to my side of the truck. “What is this place?” She gestured at the concrete.

I blew out some air. _How to explain doomsday preppers to an alien?_ “Ah, well, a lot of people over the years came to the belief that the… world was going to end, or the government was going to declare war on its citizens, or we’d get in a foreign war so bad that people weren’t safe even here in the heartland. Some of them, those with a lot of money and time, built places like this to come and live in if the apocalypse ever hit.”

She nodded. “Sensible, given the circumstances. But how would this have helped them? If bombs are as powerful as you’ve said, they’d still starve, eventually. At best they should have cultivated farmland.”

I agreed. “It wasn’t _really_ about survival, in the long term. I think it was about having a place to feel safe. It wasn’t _rational,_ it was largely driven by fear of change and a desire for control, I think. They could sit inside and point their guns _out_ and feel like nobody would bother them. Of course, anybody really intent on killing them would have just blown up their infrastructure and moved on. But it will make a good hideout, in this short term survival situation.” Haley poked her head back out, human again, and waved us on. I scooted over along the bench, and Delmutt got in the passenger side. With Skylar following along behind we drove through the field and into the garage.

It wasn’t that bad inside, to be honest. Rough, but functional. They’d got themselves a generator, and there were lights strung up in the place. The floor was untreated lumber, and a metal door stood open, leading further into the facility. Skylar scooched to one side of the four-car garage, giving us enough room to fit in, barely- She pulled the door closed behind us. I was still incapable of standing, so I relied on Haley to pull me out and set me in the wheelchair. Then we held conference one more time.

Haley started- “I walked the upper floors, the place is uninhabited. There’s a ladder leading to a lower level, a pantry, an armory with not much in it, a barracks, and a few rooms with gun slits facing outwards. Skylar will have to stay out here, but there’s a lot of room for the rest of us. Whatever you’re wanting us to do, I hope you brought the means to do it because the truck’s basically out of gas and we’re a long way south of the city.”

I smiled. What did she take me for, a guy who’d never been through armageddon? I closed my eyes, and took in the mood of the place. _Stillness_. Silence. Room to breathe, to _think ._ Perfect. “Get out those Pathfinder books. In the truck bed, next to the canned food. We’ve got a few days here, I hope, and it’s time to metagame like we’ve never metagamed before.”


	16. Interlude - Tribulation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final version of the cover art has arrived! Thanks again to RHL_Shen, what an amazing piece! https://i.imgur.com/tyc9Z1O.jpg  
> Check her out on instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/rhl_shen/
> 
> Also, Haley's "Young" character sheet, Chapters 16-17: https://bit.ly/2KCZQh7

\---

Delmutt The Woodcutter, Present Day

\---

Delmutt was feeling a little better after a day and a half at the bunker. Sean had shown Miss Haley something that had _really_ excited her, though Delmutt hadn’t really grasped the finer points of it- how could one just _declare_ oneself a master craftsman, even in whatever silly game was powering her magic now? But Miss Haley had disappeared into the basement room with the entire gold stash for 8 hours that very afternoon, before coming up and declaring that was “Her limit” for the night. The next day she did it again. Whatever they were working on, Delmutt hoped it would succeed. She could not take her mind’s eye off the images of the vessels stacked like cordwood on the side of the road, or the great black buzzing things over the refugee camp that Sean called “Black Hawks.” They looked nothing like the birds _she_ had seen, but they were entirely menacing. This world was too hostile to her kind. A savior was needed.

She’d used their “Cell phones” to speak with Ayen, at the stadium. The military had not moved them- instead, they had bundled several thousand more refugees _into_ the building, and sealed all exits with barbed wire and barricades. The food situation was good, and morale was holding- the vessel breeding pits were still operational so there was hope yet of replacements for the feeble and infirm among their vessels, and no major diseases ran rampant, but the general sense at the camp was of unease. The men outside could kill them at any time, and their human friends had all been removed. Some infomorphs had tried the barriers and been summarily shot, but aside from those casualties they had not fired on the crowd. The army was waiting for something, Ayen felt. But she continued to recruit new members to the cause, and there were several promising service tunnels that they hoped to use when the day came for an escape. Only one of them seemed to have any human activity, though what they were _doing_ bustling in and out of that place, nobody knew.

Delmutt spent her free time learning how to drive the truck, a task made awkward but not impossible by her elongated forelimbs. Human technology _fascinated_ her. The power that one of these vehicles contained, that every person had seemingly at their fingertips- no _wonder_ they had covered the world in their cities. She also spent a lot of time with Miss Skylar. It had been so long since she had nurtured such a young soul, it was her heart’s delight to speak with her about this world they were both discovering for the first time.

“What were your parents like, where you came from?” asked the dragon-girl, crouched down on her belly in the field outside the garage. Even lowering herself so, Delmutt still barely came up to her chin.

Delmutt reminisced. “Oh, I grew up in a house with two siblings, an intermix of 10 or so parents who’d all agreed to share portions of themselves in our creation. It was chaotic, a big brickwork building in the middle of a busy city. When I first woke up I knew a little bit about so many things! How to speak, how to make paper, how to throw a punch, how to breed vessels. I just didn’t know what any of it _meant_ to me. They were in and out so often, their faces became a blur.”

The big girl snorted. “I know what _that’s_ like. Father _never_ has time for us. After Mother passed on, he sent us off to the neighbors for homeschool or just let our oldest brother and sister raise us. Hunter and Piper were more like my mom and dad, and now he’s- he’s,” she inhaled a big sniffle, “dead, and I don’t know _what_ I’m going to do. The others didn’t even _care!”_

Delmutt hugged her giant snout. “They do care, there’s just something wrong with their minds, right now. Miss Haley said they’re caught up in that monster’s story. We’ll get them out, somehow. And I think… you’ll always have _her_ as a friend, after what you’ve done for her. She and Sean have no children. I’m sure they’d think of you as one of their own.” Delmutt wasn’t _really_ sure about that, she didn’t quite understand the whole ‘Biological reproduction’ thing, but the child clearly needed comfort.

And that pendant! Once she knew the source of the dragon magic, she had quickly bartered with the young woman in the event that she was able to remove it some day. The girl considered it a curse, but Delmutt thought it might be the ultimate blessing. They were all trapped in one body or another here, in this harsh land with no spare vessels. Why _not_ make it one with the armor of a soldier, the wings of a scout, flaming breath beyond anything she’d seen before- it was a dream.

Beyond that, she worked with Sean. Miss Haley had reached _some_ kind of magical next-stage soon after they arrived, and used something on him called “Infernal Healing,” apparently a spell considered _evil_ by the rules of her inconsistent powers _,_ though Delmutt couldn’t see why. Within a minute, wounds that should have taken months to heal had knitted closed, and his leg had recovered full functionality, though there appeared to be a bit of lingering nerve damage- or else his mind was not keeping up with his body. In either case, he was a bit shaky on his feet for the next day, and they spent the time walking the woods outside the bunker.

She noticed him jumping at the crack of branches, and the sharp _caw_ of the birds of this world. He truly was injured then, in his mind. To distract him she talked to him and by extension Sherriff in her native tongue, for practice. “< _Why didn’t the healing work as well on Miss Haley? She used it on herself several times, and her wounds shrank but didn’t close as yours did. >” _He sighed, in the way she was becoming familiar with when he was trying to think of how to explain some concept to her.

“< _She has… in the game system… she has a tremendously large pool of hit points, that represent how much damage she can take. I probably only have a dozen at most. She probably has well over_ a hundred _. The spell, it heals maybe ten points of damage per cast-_ >”

Delmutt thought she understood. “ _ <More than enough to bring you to peak health, but hardly anything to her. She can take a wound that would kill a normal vessel nine times over and survive, but->” _

He finished for her. “ _ <but the healing will take that much more from our resources. Yes. Still I’d rather she have that health pool than not.>” _ He was very precious about his mate, Delmutt thought, given that she was an armored killing machine and he had nearly died the night before to a single bullet. It was sweet, but also a bit silly. _Ah, love._  She missed her partner.

She decided to broach a more touchy subject. _“ <You seem unsettled. Are you nervous about our hideaway? You were very certain of your plan, last night, what’s bothering you now?>” _

He looked away, seemingly embarrassed at his own behavior, into the dense undergrowth surrounding their field. Delmutt longed to get into that brush, to chop with her limbs and haul with her strong back, but it wasn’t the time. For a long time, he was silent. She thought he wasn’t going to respond at all, but eventually he came back with a question. “ _ <Why did you join us out here, Miss D? Besides your fascination with dragons, I mean.>” _

She considered her answer. “ _ <I’m not an adventurer. I don’t think any of you are, either. But I saw you trying to do something, while everyone else sat and waited. If anyone is going to reorder the world, it’s people like you. I want there to be a voice for my people, some advocate, when you have your power.>” _

He nodded, but the frown didn’t leave his expression. “ _ <So you don’t care if we’re wrong or right, then? As long as we’re moving forward?”> _

She was honestly puzzled by the question. She gestured at the world, in general. “ _ <To the degree that you care about what is best for others, I think you are in the right. If I find someone who cares _more, _I’ll let you know. >” _He made no answer. Eventually, she left to find other company.

The Dog she avoided. Something about it unsettled her. Shadow creatures flickered in and out of existence wherever it went, tidying up or playing strange pranks on one another. It kept to itself for the most part, though she saw it talking with Haley in the times when she left the basement. Better to have it as an ally, she supposed, but she didn’t trust it despite the service it had rendered as they made their escape. The world of its story, where wordplay could upset the balance of nature, was fundamentally unsettling to her as a creature of pure thought. She did not want to know what would happen if she ever fell under the sway of that thing.

At the end of that second day, after Miss Haley had come up from the basement and Sean was preparing dinner for the rest of the group from the supplies he had collected, Delmutt caught up with the great gold dragon-woman. Of all of them, she was the one that commanded the most respect. Her conviction, her _power_ , and the kindness of her heart- they were good reasons to follow. But she had not been tested, yet. Not really.

Delmutt sat with her for a while as she watched the sun slowly sink behind the horizon. “We haven’t spoken much.”

Haley seemed lost in thought, as Sean had been. “No, I’m sorry for that. You came to help us and I’ve practically been ignoring you, I’m so caught up in events. Thank you, for talking to Skylar. I get the impression she hasn’t been socialized much.”

Delmutt plucked a strand of the strange grass that grew here, chewed it in her mandibles. “I contribute where I can. Carrying a rifle didn’t seem much use, at the moment. Not with such powerful enemies. How will you beat him?”

Haley muttered a few words, and an image sprang to life. It floated in the air before them, taking up the sky over the field. It was an enormous woodcut, featuring four men on the backs of large beasts. Each was more terrible than the last. One bore a bow, the next a sword, the third a scale, and the final was little more than a skeleton cloaked in skin. Every aspect was rendered in perfect clarity. Delmutt hummed, quietly. _Already she can do this and her power has only begun to manifest._ Haley interrupted her reverie. “Aslan was never the enemy. This painting- Albrecht Durer, ‘The Four Horsemen.’ It’s been on my mind lately. Pestilence, War, Famine… Death. _Those_ are the enemies.”

There was wisdom in that, Delmutt conceded. “You would make truce with a monster or a madman if it let you defeat these four, in the end?”

Haley did not nod or shake her head, only stared at the image. “It unsettles me. But in a lateral thinking kind of way, making our peace with him would stave off a fight, let us both turn our attentions toward settling the rest of the world. And it would keep the rest of you out of danger. I’m not even _particularly_ concerned about the people he might kill if we let him be, as awful as that is to say. My power should give us the means to reverse that, I hope. And who knows, maybe he really is sending the righteous ones to paradise in the meantime. The world is a strange and unfamiliar place, now. I’ll have a way to know for certain soon enough and then I’ll decide. But how to make peace, should it come to that? He _requires_ my death, for his victory. I can’t take myself off the board.” She frowned. The image vanished, replaced by one of their human vessels, a male, being nailed to a large piece of wood. _Such gruesome art, these humans create._ Haley continued “I only get one shot and I can’t come back. It’s possible that _he_ can.”

\---

Sean & Haley, 8 years ago

\---

I slammed the door to our apartment and let out a primal scream. “AHHHHHH!”

Haley slid down onto the couch, face first, her bags falling to the floor. “Oof.”

I caught my breath and went to collapse next to her. “Seriously, that was the worst. No more weddings. No more family. No more _going outside._ ”

She considered, from her face-down position. “Ever again? Extreme, but I am coming around to your position. No more _sisters,_ at any rate.”

I had to disagree there. “Are you kidding? Your sister is easily the best part of these events. Hardship is what brings us together, and she’s like the obstacle course at the end of a three mile run. The kind with live ammunition.”

She turned her head out of the couch to glare at me. I thought she might actually be slightly _un-sober_ , for once. “You’d better not ditch me for her.”

I laughed at that. “I’m saying she sucks so hard it’s like a shared trauma that brings us closer together. She managed to make that whole thing a nightmare for at least two-thirds of the guest list, that is a power move. Also, you’re drunk.”

She blew her lips in a raspberry. “Nooooo I’m not. And no she’s not. She’s always been prettier than me. Got all the attention. She was always sick, and hurting, and mom had to stay home to take care of her. She stole my boyfriends in high school. Now I have to watch her get _married_  and the whole _universe_ revolves around her.”

I tried not to guffaw, I had a feeling it would get me kicked, given my position next to her feet. “And look how great your life is, because of her! Even your virtues are all her, in the end.”

She nodded, absorbed in the self-pity, before the words caught up to her. “Wait, what do you mean?” She glared at me suspiciously.

“Well you went to college to distinguish yourself from her, and here you are with a doctorate. You spent most of your twenties not worrying about dating because she’d screw it up, and now you have a really good relationship with an awesome guy,” I _did_ get kicked for that one, but lightly, “and you had to learn to rely on your own self for company so you turned out to be this incredibly wise, compassionate person who everyone loves to be around. Damn! She thought of everything.”

She was pouting but I could see laughter in her eyes. “You don’t get to mock, only child. You never had to compete for your parent’s love.”

I nodded solemnly. “That’s true, I think my parents were incapable of the emotion. But _you_ had to compete, and as a result you give love like it has an expiration date. She’s got you again! All your virtues, simply bright reflections in a dark pool.”

She sighed, defeated at last. “We never know who we are unless we go outside our scripts. She always pushed me outside of mine. I really did define myself as her opposite, when we were young, and I grew super fast in all the ways that picture fit me. But in some ways it didn’t, and I never grew at all, there. I never figured out how to talk to people, or how to have a relationship, because those were things _she_ was good at. But I wanted them, deep down, and that _hurt_.”

I put a hand on her leg to move her over. “Well, you’re doing a bang-up job now. I think… when we’re young we craft an identity by looking at the people in our lives, and saying I _am_ this or I’m _not_ that, and it feels like the most important thing in the world to have that mask, to _be_ that mask. But nobody _really_ knows themselves that well, not until they’ve been through a bit of life with that mask on. And sometimes not all the pieces fit. You’ve realized that there are parts of you, the isolationist parts, that don’t really fit. I’m really glad, because how else would we have met?”

She didn’t say anything, so I continued. “The most important thing I ever learned was when to take the mask off, and how to say ‘I guess I’m _not_ this part, after all’ without feeling like a hypocrite. You can admit you need love. Sometimes I think the whole point of the tribulations of life is to teach us that we _all_ need love.”

I heard a snore from behind me then. She had fallen asleep at some point during my sermon. That was alright. I could tell her I loved her any time I wanted, these days. I pulled a throw over her, kissed her on the head, and turned out the light.

\---

Charles Kaur, Present Day

\---

In his dream, he was home. He knew it was a dream, but still- _home_. He looked out the back window at the vast yard, wide as a country mile, his three sons and two daughters playing in the grass. His wife was in the next room, alive, with him again, making dinner- that didn’t track at all, she had died in childbirth along with their sixth. This _couldn’t_ be real, but… for a sun-drenched moment, he had not a care in the world. He let it linger, held it tightly so it wouldn’t slip through his fingers. But it passed, in the end. Eventually he turned to the red-eyed man in tight blue jeans and high cowboy boots, sitting across from him at his kitchen table. He didn’t recognize his face, but something about that cocksure grin made him _hurt_ , deep down, the kind of pain in your joints that told you winter was coming soon, that you were old and maybe this would be the one you didn’t survive. “I imagine you’re here on business, because you sure don’t fit this scene.”

The grinning man solemnly bowed his head and intoned, mockingly: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”

Charles grunted, and found himself decked in his own Garments. “Theology, then. Am I going to meet your Lord?”

A voice rumbled then, so loud that Charles thought it would wake him. “And your Lord as well. Greetings to you, Charles Kaur, and thanks be for your service.” It stood outside the door, in that sunlit porch. Between him and his children, flickered a thought through the back of Charles’ mind. It was regal, and huge, and _good_ , and looked for all the world like the Second Coming. His heart leapt with joy, in secret- _validation_ , at last, for all that he had been doing. He had been so scared that he might be in the wrong, in his heart of hearts. Had cried _out_ for a sign. Now his lord and savior had come for him at last, and all might be set right.

But Charles was somewhat warier than he might have been, two days prior. As he’d glanced away, the man at his kitchen table had vanished. He felt his soul lighten slightly in the man’s absence- whatever _that_ thing was, if the Lion was employing it… Charles had questions. “You’d be the one from up North, then. You the reason I can’t get any word from St. Renaud? You the one who had my men shot two days ago, at the stadium in Midland? Lord, you have a lot to answer for.”

The Lion shook his head, his great mane heaving like waves on a golden sea. “I answer to one only, and _You_ are not Him. Your concern for your men does you credit, but fear not. Death holds no great meaning, in my lands. You will see those who pass beyond the Veil again. It is necessary, to bring about the Golden Age. Already I gather your men in St. Renaud to my side. Will you join me as well? Midland City must stand with me.”

His suspicions were _not_ allayed. Colonel Kaur, now in his dress blues, put both hands on the table. There was something about this Lion that rankled him. The dismissal of violence, the disregard for lives- it reminded him of parts of _himself_ that he could not look at any longer. Something he rejected, outright. “Had you come to me in peace, I’d have knelt. _Joyfully_. But you _shot first_ and you had to know there was no reason for that, if you know me at all. There’s more than one god wandering about right now, or so my intel officers tell me. And the devil has been known to take pleasing forms. You’ve offered violence to my city and my men, and you bargain from a position of strength. What is it you fear? What happens if I reject you?”

The Lion growled, and the world outside his home darkened. Still it did not come in. Behind it, his children approached. Four of them were wearing crowns, but Hunter- his eldest- was glassy eyed, his shirt torn and bloody. The great cat spoke contemptuously, “Fear. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. I _fear_ the suffering that must occur, should you stand against me. Against your own children.”

Charles started, at that. “They’re _alive?!_ They disappeared on the night of the disaster, we- I thought-” hope bloomed again in his heart, and… _anger_. _You could have told me then. You could have let me see them._

The Lion nodded solemnly. “They have been Chosen, son of Adam. They will be Kings and Queens of this world. When We come to the tower.”

“And Hunter?” Charles asked quietly, dangerously. Perilously close to defying a being that he truly believed might be his own God. “How did you Choose, for him?”

“He would not let me help him. He chose cunning instead of belief. His prison, and yours, is only in your own mind, yet you are in it; and so afraid of being taken in that you cannot be taken out.”

The Colonel stood, slowly, and walked to that glass door. He stood face to face with the Lion, separated only by a pane of glass. Even in a dream, the _presence_ of that divine beast shook him to his core. But he mastered himself, looked it square in the eyes. What he saw there did not make him flinch. He had inflicted worse, in his time in the service. “I know you’re not Jesus. Not mine.”

The Lion glowered, and lowered its’ massive body like a cat ready to pounce. Lightning struck the ground outside. The thunder rattled his windows, but still they stood. “And the cause of your certainty, Charles Kaur?”

“Jesus would have known that if he ever touched one of _my_ children, I’d stare Him in the eyes and walk backwards into hell.” The Lion _sprang_ , and Charles knew those claws would be the end of him, dream or no. But the glass held. The fortress of his mind was still his own. It _roared_ , and portions of the house collapsed. Charles yelled at it, mocking over the noise. “You godlings! Bring your armies and your devils and all the forces of Creation against us! Still we stand, you son of a bitch!”

The house _collapsed_ with a roar and all was plunged into darkness. He stood there, for an eternity, wondering if death had claimed him. Eventually a match flared, and lit the space. He was seated again, at his kitchen table in the middle of a vast void. The red-eyed man was sitting across from him, hands cupped around a cigarette as he tried to light it, shielding it against a terrible wind that Charles could not feel at all. The nasty man’s clothing whipped at the edges, and he _leaned_ in his chair to avoid being blown away entirely. He grinned at Charles, insolent, infinitely patient. “Sorry ‘bout the cat. He ain’t a tame lion, you know.”

Charles considered him. Came to a conclusion. “Doesn’t seem like the side you’re usually on.”

The man leaned back and took a drag on the cigarette. “Sides? I haven’t got a side, except my own. What did the universe ever do for me, that I should care one bit about what happens to it? He and I are walking side by side, for a time. But I’m the walkin’ _dude_ , and I’ll ramble on long after he’s gone.”

Charles nodded. “You have a counter-offer, then?”

The man leaned forward, and his cigarette went out. There was no light in that space, but still Charles could see his eyes. Perfectly red, illuminated from within, peering at him. “No offers, no covenants. Just some advice for the future, my man. Sometimes in the game of life, the only thing you can do is flip the board.” The eyes blinked closed, and he was alone in the darkness. Perfectly alone.

He woke with a _start_ to find Captain Kitchener hammering on the door to his office. Scrambling off the field-cot he’d had brought in, he opened the door. The Captain saluted smartly. “Sir! Reports from the field. Movement out of St. Renaud. We don’t know _what_. There was a- a wave of _fire,_ every unit we had east of Copernica is just _gone-”_

Charles cut him off, “Call Redman AFB, scramble the bomb wing. Get any fighter coverage we have left into the air. I want every unit on alert along the 70 corridor. Armor on the roads, infantry dug in at the overpasses. He’s a _god_ but his army still has _wheels_ , Captain. You see _anything_ coming West on 70, you shoot them.” He stood up, and looked up at the stadium, now one part refugee-camp, one part military C&C hub. It looked… _different_ , he thought. _Taller_ , more baroque. Like an old Roman colosseum. As quickly as the thought entered his mind, it vanished.

The captain stared at him in concern. “Sir! That’s a civilian road in the middle of the country! Three days ago you talked about a holy war. _Two_ days ago you ordered a massacre of these aliens. Now you’re talking about shooting our citizens . We _can’t do that,_ Colonel.”

The colonel shook his head. “No, captain, they’re _his_ citizens now, and they just shot _first_. We defend ourselves, and this city, or we die. Maybe the whole world dies. He’s coming this way and I don’t know what he wants, but death means _nothing_ to him and he intends to use my _kids_ to get his way. He’ll kill the rest of us regardless. Do you trust that jumped up jungle cat, after what his men did to yours two nights ago?”

The captain considered. “No sir, I don’t. But how can we fight him? He just blew away _satellites,_ sir. _From a standing start on the ground._ ”

The Colonel finished his thought, striding towards the communications building. “We can stick in his throat, Captain. We can make him work for it. Get me NMO on the phone.”


	17. Chapter 17

\---

3 days ago

\---

I sat in the darkened garage with the books spread out in front of me, along with Haley, Delmutt, Skylar and the Dog. “It’s time to metagame like we’ve never metagamed before.”

The Dog _harumphed._ “That should be easy, I’ve never metagamed in my life.” Delmutt also looked a bit puzzled.

I sat back. “Okay, from the top. You all know that Haley runs on Pathfinder rules. In Pathfinder, there are lots of systems for how strong you can be, how many hits you can take. But the most broken portions of the game are the systems that govern magic.”

Haley, in human form and cross legged before me, nodded. “That makes sense, it’s the system that isn’t really representational of any real world idea. It has less to bind it, and it’s _supposed_ to be fantastic.”

I pointed at her in approval. “Yes. Pathfinder is somewhat less broken than previous versions of the system, but it still has some unbelievable exploits available, and we inherited the Rules-As-Written version of the system. So, what we are going to do is craft an _infinite wish engine._ ”

Delmutt held up a claw, “Forgive me, I haven’t played this game, but that sounds impossibly powerful. Why would the game allow that?”

Haley turned to her. “Well, that’s the problem with these games in general, there are so many rules and systems that over time loopholes become available. Normally the person running the game wouldn’t allow this, but there’s nobody in charge of _me._ I think.So,” she turned back to me, “I guess you want to go with the Candle of Invocation trick? Summon a genie, and wish for more wishes? But where do we get the candle? I can’t _make_ it, I need to wait at least another age category before I can take the Crafting feats.”

I held up my hand- “Ah, but that’s where we are going to steal a march on everyone. Normally, yes, we’d need to wait several more days before you qualified. But you have _two_ feats available. The first one you should take is ‘Master Craftsman.’ I held the book out to her and she read the indicated lines.

“I see, I can use any mundane Craft skill as my caster level for the purposes of the feat, and the crafting check. So I put 12 points into Craft- Books or something…”

I clapped my hands in excitement, “and you get 2 more for the craftsman feat, 3 more for it being a trained class skill, and 4 more due to your intelligence, and suddenly you’re crafting like a 21st level caster. Take ten on the crafting checks, and get a plus 2 from someone else pitching in, and you can make anything up to a difficulty of _33_ trivially. That’s more than enough for the Candle, which was always priced too low. All we need then is, uh, about four hundred thousand dollars worth of gold and jewels, which I _believe_ we have covered-” I indicated the back of the truck where the spoils of our burglary spree were laying- “and you should be able to make a candle in about two and a half days. We can hold out for that long.”

Haley grinned and I could see the idea taking hold in her mind. “It costs an extra feat slot, and those are valuable but I assume that when we have access to _infinite wishes_ I can adjust that. Okay. I can get the first ‘Day’ of crafting in tonight, if I move. Is everybody on board with this?” There was a general round of nods from the group, even Skylar, who was listening over their shoulders. I got the impression that they were all a little lost, but that was okay- in a couple days they’d be able to _wish_ understanding right into their brains, if they wanted. Haley closed her eyes and got to work.

\---

Present Day

\---

On our third day at the bunker, our fifth overall since the night of the Swap, Haley emerged from the basement. She found the rest of us sitting outside the garage, staring to the North-East. The distant sounds of bombs and artillery fire were coming to us over the horizon, muffled _whumps_ and longer, rumbling explosions, punctuated occasionally by a flash like lightning from the low-hanging clouds.

“How far do you think?” asked Delmutt, sitting beside me on the grass.

“Miles and miles,” I answered, though truth be told I had no real idea. “Those noises would be deafening up close, so twenty to thirty miles at least.” I longed for a news report, or just a radio out here. Binoculars would be no good with these trees, not unless I asked Skylar or Haley to take me up in the air, and I wasn’t _about_ to do that with the number of combat aircraft we’d seen streaking by, in both directions. I didn’t _know_ how a dragon would register on radar, but I wasn’t keen to find out.

“What’s going on?” Asked Haley, perhaps sensing the mood, and up-shifting to her dragon form. She had swelled, in three more days of her ludicrous growth rate. Easily 17 feet long and multiple tons, she _towered_ over the rest of us. She was Skylar’s equal in stature now. I believed she was well within the “Juvenile” category at this point. Her horns and fins were getting quite impressive- more akin to an elephant’s tusks-and-fans- though with different orientations of course- than the tiny nubs they had been, just a week ago. The sheer _presence_ of her was radiant, and she captured the group’s attention without even noticing. As we all watched her she peered along the treeline, but didn’t seem to perceive any more of the violence than the rest of us had.

“It’s war,” said the Dog. “War for the heart and soul of the world. You’ll have to fight, too.”

She bobbed her enormous head. “Well, that was always the plan. And now we have an ace in our back pocket.”

I sat up- “So you have it then? Crafting check succeeded?” She held out one massive paw. In it, tiny against her bulk, was a tapered candle. Simple and undecorated white, it would not have been out of place at any church or dinner table in the country. But there was a _weight_ to it that had nothing to do with its appearance. _This is an item that can change the world. The power to reshape reality._

“If I hadn’t watched four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold melt seamlessly into this thing, I’d think I was full of crap,” she said. For all that, there was a respectful silence among the group.

Eventually Delmutt broke it. “Should we wait to light it, do you think? Is there some auspicious time?” I understood her hesitation. It was a real threshold we were about to cross.

Trying to ignore the urgency of the situation presented by the muffled explosions, I gave it some thought. “I don’t think we can rely on unspoken plan guarantees, here. It’s not that kind of narrative. We all know she has it, it’s to our advantage to make sure it works, get the biggest power-up we can out of it, and give the rest of us access to it as well. But before we summon the thing, let’s give Haley every advantage she can get. You just went up another age category, right dear?” She nodded. “Okay, let’s get you kitted out.”

\---

2 days ago

\---

“Hey, I’m here to uh, ‘Aid Another’ with you. Lemme tell you how to write books real good, somehow that’s gonna help your craft check to make a candle, I guess,” I rambled, coming down the ladder into the basement where she was slaving away. We didn’t really know how to craft a Wondrous Item using the power of being a _really good author,_ the craft skill Haley had chosen. The rules said it was fine, but we didn’t have a clue what _it_ actually entailed. Haley had a large vellum notebook out and was simply writing the most detailed forty-thousand word description of a magic candle that anybody had ever penned. It _seemed_ to be working- the gold pile on the desk was gradually thinning, and it was possible that something was taking shape underneath it.

She sat back at the human-sized desk and blew out hard through her lips. “This is all just so _surreal_. The world may be _ending_ out there, and I’m in a fallout shelter basement writing a fifty page essay on _wax_. And if I write good enough, ta-da! I get to _become God._ ”

I walked over and gave her the good shoulder rubs, the kind I only broke out for special occasions. “Well, I have to say I prefer it over the kind of apotheosis that requires you be nailed to a tree.”

She chuckled nervously at that. “Well, let’s not jump the gun yet.”

I picked up that she wasn’t _entirely_ joking. “Uh-oh, what’s going on in that incomprehensibly brilliant mind of yours?” She really _had_ been getting smarter, with all the age-based stat bonuses recently- it was the most subtle effect of all, but I could _see_ it in her, a deepening a focus, a quickening of insight. She was beginning to make connections that I couldn’t follow.

She sighed. “The Dog said, before we got here, that Luke gets a lightsaber and Darth Vader gets a death star. Aslan wants to cast me in the role of villain, for the purposes of his story, whatever _that_ means. The villain’s going to get the bigger power up, and the big vulnerability. What do you call this plan, if not an immense power up?”

A valid point, but: “Think of the alternative- going against him without anything at our back. This doesn’t come with any _particular_ vulnerability, that I can see.”

She shook her head and got out of the chair to pace. “I’ll have near-absolute power if it works, but the vulnerability is inherent- he _wants_ to die, his resurrection is when we lose. If I choose this-” she indicated the candle. “This path, play the antagonist to him, I’ll win at first and then I’ll die. That’s the story of the White Witch.”

I didn’t like _that_ train of thought. I stopped her pacing, put both hands on her shoulders. “You have already defied death more times than I can count, in the last week alone. Never forget that what you’re trying to do is help _everyone_. No twisted vision of the End Times, no murder and mayhem. He can _declare_ you a villain all he wants. But he doesn’t have the monopoly on moral authority, in _this_ universe. Don’t play his game. Keep the Death Star in your back pocket. We’ll find another way to beat him.”

She leaned into me then, and kissed me, and for a while we made very little progress at all.

\---

Present Day

\---

We stood in the field outside the bunker, in a loose circle. The sun was hidden behind the clouds, giving the whole scene a shadowless grey light that made the sounds of all-out war that much more ominous. It was not, I reflected, the _best_ environment in which to embark on a path to godhood, but we made do with what we had. I put my hand on Haley’s trunk-like forearm as she crouched down, staring at the candle which we had embedded upright in the loose soil.

“Okay,” she breathed, and with a flick of _Mage Hand,_ struck a match and held it to the wick. It caught. Nothing really happened at first. We stood there for a moment, watching the candle begin to burn. “It, uh, doesn’t really come with instructions, does it.” she said nervously.

I agreed, it would have been nice if crafting it had given her some insight into how it _worked._ “Maybe just tell it what you want? It’s probably extremely literal.”

“I, uh, I’d like to summon and bind one Efreeti. Efreet. Using the gate function of the candle. Please?” she ended.

The Dog chuckled, “Very polite of you dear, I’m sure the candle is extremely impressed.”

Maybe it was, at that. The whole thing _flared,_ consumed in an instant. We all stepped back a pace. As it burned, the light of the day _changed,_ and something was illuminated that we could not previously see. It looked like a great wall, or a barrier, seen _through_ the world. Its distance, its height, were impossible to judge. It might have been on the other side of the planet or the other end of the universe. It was as if everything _except_ it was completely transparent to this new form of light. “I am really glad I don’t have a geiger counter on me right now,” I quipped nervously.

The barrier, whatever it was, began to shift. It shuddered, and we could feel the _world_ vibrating out, pulses in reality timed with whatever was happening at that great wall. Blocks the size of galaxies shifted. A hole was forming. Something came through.

The light faded, but the _thing_ remained. There in front of us, standing 12 feet high, was a giant woman. She had red skin, bull’s horns on her brow, and armor made of a coppery metal with inscriptions on it that made my eyes hurt. Her skin _smoked_ , in the cool afternoon air, thick black plumes pouring off her, and on her back was a sword that looked like it was made of _fire_. She did not look happy to see us.

It was interesting, some part of me reflected as I stumbled back, how often I had read something like “He towered 12 feet high” in a fantasy novel without really thinking about the scales involved. 12 feet didn’t seem like all that much in the context of a giant. Yet a seven foot tall _human_ was absolutely overwhelming, in person. Five more feet beyond that did not put her firmly in the _incomprehensible_ category, did not reduce her to a living piece of scenery in the way that a redwood tree might be. But that made her all the more terrifying to me- she was simply _too big_. Too big to be real, but here she was.

“Lady Jada, of the Brass City” she intoned, as if announcing herself to a ballroom, or an arena. “You have summoned me.” She _pulled_ , then, almost experimentally, in a dimension that shouldn’t have existed. Something in the air where the candle had been _flexed_ under the strain, and- snapped. She smiled, maliciously. _All_ of us were stepping back now, save Haley. “But you have not _bound_ me. I speak for the worldline of _Scheherazade_ , little mortals. What are you, before She of a thousand and one tales?” She unslung the sword on her back, and peered around. “Your story requires the use of us. How unfortunate for you. We do not submit, without _challenge_!”

With a roar and a spring she _leapt_ at Haley, throwing up a huge gout of earth from her starting point. Haley stood stock still, not one muscle moving. That enormous sword _hissed_ as it cut through the air, and straight through Haley’s neck. I gave a shout, tried to move forward- my hands moving to the pistols on my hip- but realized even as I was doing so that something was _wrong_ with the picture in front of me. “NOOOOwhat.” Haley _rippled_ , the sword passing cleanly through her, then vanished. An illusion! As that great golden form vanished, Haley was revealed- shrunk to human form, and holding the vorpal sword.

“Rule one,” she said, impossibly sharp sword flashing out and catching the astonished genie’s own weapon on the backswing- “Never give the enemy time to cast. Rule _two_ ,” the sword of fire simply _came apart_ with the stroke of the impossible blade, “try not to use flaming weapons on people who _breath fire._ ” Delmutt and I both had our guns out now, and began planting shots into the armored back of the red giant. They weren’t doing much but stinging, for her size and toughness, but still- they were distractions. Skylar had her paws over her head and was cowering away from the melee- _poor kid_.

Haley shouted at the rest of us, “Cease fire! Subdued, not dead!” and we obeyed, though it was hard to watch. Even disarmed that thing was a menace. It swung at Haley with fists the size of boulders, but she was still armed, and despite the size difference she had the strength advantage. She deflected with the weirdly non-euclidean flat of her sword, while the Dog attempted to hamstring the thing and half-corporeal animal creatures began manifesting all over it, searching for areas to hammer or kick or bite.

Suddenly, the creature vanished. I gave a start and looked around, my heart sinking. “Plane shift? Did it run? Are we screwed?” I really should have known better than to open my mouth.

Before Haley could shout a warning, I saw it- the heavy swaying of the grass as something huge, and _invisible,_ pelted towards me. “Oh shi-” was all I got out, before a ring of _violet fire_ sprang up around me, almost perfectly circling me. The edges of my arm-hairs just avoided passing into it, and I stood perfectly still, unable to even widen my stance to help with balance. I couldn’t _feel_ any heat, but I knew this form of the _Wall of Fire_ spell. She’d set it to radiate _outwards._ The grass outside the ring was already on fire, and the heat out there was so intense it was making the air waver. A prison, then- one slip from me and I’d pass into the portion that emitted heat. Sherriff spoke up- < _Why is it always fire with you? > Well, sometimes it’s bullets, _I provided helpfully.

The Efreet stepped through the wall of fire, behind me. Still invisible, the flames parted around her form and I could _feel_ her towering over me. She laughed in my head, telepathically. I assumed she was speaking to the others as well by the way I saw them all jerk to a halt. “ _Hold,_ stay your blades or I kill this one. You fight with cunning, scaled one. But I have nothing to lose, and _this_ one,” I felt her lean down and place an enormous hand on my head- it practically smashed my spine and _did_ stagger me nearly face-first into the fire, “appears to be precious to you. You will bind your story to ours, for no less than one year, or he will die here and now.”

I felt the _fear,_ then. That same fear I’d been holding onto since the police on that rain-swept road had aimed their rifles at me. The fear that had recurred, stronger and stronger, every time I’d faced death in the last week. The fear that made me turn my face away from Delmutt in shame, the day before. I did not _want_ to die. I did not think I was a coward. But my mind wasn’t _equipped_ for this. I was paralyzed, unable to move or think. Sherriff spoke soothing words in my mind: “ _< This will pass, she’ll get us out of it, trust your girl. You ent any kinda coward for fearing death but you gotta work through it, don’t lose yourself.>” _

Haley stood, stock still. Considering. Eventually she spoke. “Rule _three._ ”

\---

1 hour ago

\---

“So you just aged up again and you have one feat slot open, and you can cast spells!” I said to Haley, still watching the light show on the horizon. She nodded absentmindedly. “I want to introduce you to the most broken feat in Pathfinder.” She made a ‘Go on’ gesture at me, without speaking. I continued, delighted by my own cleverness. “It’s called _Sacred Geometry_ and, get this- it lets you apply any two metamagic feats you _don’t know_ to any spell, _for free_ , and all you have to do is solve a simple math problem in your head, here’s what I’m thinking…”

\---

Present Day

\---

Haley closed her eyes, did the math required by the feat. It really _was_ ludicrously easy. The _hard_ part was going to be keeping me alive.“Rule _three._ You _do not threaten my husband.”_

A gigantic wave of frozen energy erupted from her, and radiated outwards. It was a wall, a tsunami of ice, a blizzard and an explosion of _cold_ all at once. The grass between her and our fire wall _cracked_ and shattered in the temperature difference. The monster behind me quailed, falling back a step before the torrent. It would be even worse for her than the rest of us- her kind had a vulnerability to the cold.

I _knew_ what Haley was doing and I was still having trouble seeing through it. It was a _persistent, heightened Silent Illusion,_ the most versatile spell currently in her repertoire- in this case, an illusion of some ultimate frost attack, but strengthened to such a ludicrous degree that it was almost impossible to escape. The efreet backed up with a cry as the wave swept over it, then paused, unharmed but stunned- “Wait, what?” she shouted, as she realized she’d just been taken in by a _second_ illusion in as many minutes.

That was all it had time for before two tons of angry dragon wife _body slammed_ it into the ground with a crash like the world ending and a _heave_ of the earth as the two titans made contact. Haley paused, jaws around efreet’s throat, and mouthed out. “You forgot Rule One, Lady. Submit, or lose something precious to _you_.”

The Efreet struggled, weakly, and then relented. The fire around me died down. _Hey Sherriff, I didn’t even get burned that time, we’re improving!_ My joke landed flat, in my own skull- I was still deeply shaken. _I’ve got to do something about this or I’ll never be of any use._

Eventually she nodded resignedly. “I… acknowledge your victory. Our story is bound to yours, and I am bound by your power to perform a service. What do you desire of me?”

We all stood for a moment, transfixed. Eventually Delmutt broke the silence, muttering to herself- “Why does everyone else get better vessels than _me_?”

Haley shook herself, released her hold on the genie, and stood back. “Uh- Jada, we are honored by your service.” Still banking on politeness. _Can’t hurt_ , I mused, rubbing the top of my head where the demon had nearly caved my skull in. “I would like to make use of your three wishes.” Jada, still prone, nodded without speaking. Haley continued. “I wish for two Candles of Invocation, identical in form and function to the one I summoned you with, _before_ I used it.”

That seemed reasonably airtight, I thought. The Efreet considered, nodded, and two candles appeared. _Well, that’s godhood then_. _Seems anticlimactic._ I supposed the only challenge left was to find the time to claim it. But Haley had some designs on that front. “For my final wish, I’d like a complete understanding of the _wish_ spell, as an Efreet would conceive it, so long as that understanding does not drive me mad or otherwise incapacitate me.” Jada rolled her eyes at the legalistic framing, but nodded again. “My business is concluded. Should you summon others of my race, the bindings will hold.” She paused, getting up off the ground, and eyed all of us. “Try not to break your universe. We will not lend you ours.” With a _pop_ of air rushing into a vacuum _,_ she vanished from our reality. A golden light shone around Haley’s head for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide. “Oh. _Oh.”_ She grinned delightedly. “I have a lot of Death Star to build.”


	18. Chapter 18

As she worked outside, we convened inside. I could hear the repeated _rip_ and _smash_ of reality being torn a new space-hole, over and over again, as she performed her summons. I tried to ignore it and focus on the others. Delmutt and Skylar were deep in conversation and I sat next to the Dog, tuning in to their discussion.

“Miss D, being a dragon is the _worst!_ You can have it if you want but you’re going to hate it. You can’t pick anything up, you have to put your _face_ into your _food_ , and you’re too _big_ to sit indoors with your friends! It would be great being big and strong and able to fly if I could shrink down like Haley can, she’s so lucky!” Skylar was back to an old familiar refrain. I liked the kid well enough, but hearing a 10 year old whine at the volumes she could reach with lungs the size of grand pianos was _rough_.

Delmutt seemed fairly unphased. She tapped the great scaled girl with one claw, a _tink_ of chitin on near-metal sounding through the garage. “You say that because you are young, and you do not yet fear death, or value the ability to defy it. It is different for the rest of us on the ground, little one. I’d trade many parts for the ability to ride through these battles without fear. Our enemies are growing stronger. For a while it was guns, then soldiers, now- _monsters_ , proper monsters. Oh, I’m not chastising you-” She hugged the girl, who had begun to whimper- “I’m just a bitter old woman who wished she had the power to change the world. You’ve been through a lot, and you’re very brave.” They stayed like that for a moment.

At some point the Dog had teleported its’ head under my hand for scritchies. I was rubbing it behind the ears when it spoke, startling me. “Death. What is death? Not an ending- not anymore, and maybe it never was. I know that well enough. The creators of the tarot had it right- death is merely _change,_ that which we fear most of all.”

_Everyone in my adventuring party is so goddamn philosophical._ I frowned at it, but did not stop the ear-scratches. It thumped one leg rhythmically. “You keep speaking like you have knowledge of the broader context of what’s going on. Is that just you spouting cryptic nonsense, or do you _get_ what’s going on here?”

The Dog vanished in a spiraling dissolve, then reappeared upside down, ready for tummy rubs. “ _You_ fear it more than most. What is it about _change_ that paralyzes you so?”

Okay, if it was going to play hardball I absolutely didn’t have to keep rubbing. ...I kept rubbing. But he wasn’t getting _both hands,_ damn it. “Alright _fine,_ don’t answer the question that would likely solve all our problems. Let’s examine me then. I don’t fear _change_ , I feel like I’m getting along pretty well given that the world is ending in fire and blood, and my wife is probably metamorphosing into a demigod outside in the yard right now.” Yet as I said it, I _felt_ that it was untrue. “I fear- I fear _pain,_ delivered at the end of a _rifle,_ and-”

“Loss,” said the dog, tongue hanging out as it stared into the air. The others had paused their own conversation now, and were listening in. I _really_ didn’t want this made public. “You fear the _loss_ that comes with change.”

I nodded, defeated. “Yes. I’m going to lose her, or- _she’s_ going to lose _me_. I just want to hold on to what we have.” I felt tears begin. “She’s the best thing in my life, and we can’t go _on_ like this, I can’t stay by her, I’m her vulnerability.” The realization rocked me. _She keeps gaining power but I stay just the same. I’m her vulnerability._ Over and over again, I was the thing holding her back, the weak point in our fights, the part she had to rush to protect.

There was a pressure on my back. It was Delmutt, offering support. The Dog rolled to its feet, and looked me in the eye. “Why? Vulnerable because you may die? Or because you cannot let go of what you _are_ , to find what the two of you _will_ be?” It gave me a long, appraising stare. “Walk with me.”

Skylar jumped up in a smooth motion. “Ooh, I want to come too!”

The Dog nodded assent, pacing away in a direction that didn’t bear any relation to three dimensional geometry. “Very well. Close your eyes, and follow.”

We closed our eyes as instructed, but somehow the Dog was still visible. _Oh boy, magic_ , I thought with a trace of bitterness. Magic and I weren’t really on _speaking terms_ right now. But we stood, and followed in that black place, leaving our bodies behind. There was a sensation as we walked, of _passage_ , of moving _beyond_ some indefinable threshold. We trod through that dark passage for a time, before the Dog reached a portal. A simple wooden kitchen door, painted white with lilies on the edges. He turned and looked back to me. “Open it.”

I hesitated, reluctant. “Why me?”

He rolled his eyes. “Because it’s your story we are speaking of. Deep, personal reasons with inherent meanings we could spend all night discussing. And because dogs _can’t open doors_ , you idiot.” Oh yeah. I sheepishly reached out and turned the knob. Beyond was a garden, overgrown, near-wild, bright and vibrant in a way I’d never seen. The flowers were a riot of colors, the trees bore fruit of every description. I inspected a rose more closely- was that _paint?_

The others stepped through- even Skylar, who had taken the form of a young girl, no more than 10. “Oh! I’m me again!” She jumped with delight and began to run around the rest of us. Delmutt was _also_ human, here. She looked like a well-muscled woman in her 40s or 50s, with close-cropped hair and an outfit of simple coveralls.

She looked the body over, jumped up and down experimentally. “Hmm, you all are much more fragile than I thought. Bones on the _inside?_ Interesting.” She wandered off with Skylar, already beginning to accumulate talking-animal interest from the garden’s denizens.

I turned to the Dog. “Wonderland, then? Non-hostile this time, I presume.”

The Dog _huffed_ in negation and began to walk. I followed, careful not to touch the still-wet flowers. “Before you visited us through Cecilia’s mind, a projection in your own world. Now you walk in Wonderland _proper_ , the power source that she drew me from. We go to meet my creator, she who shares my soul but has chosen to make these lands her home. It is not a wildland, but be careful you do not stray. Metaphors have power here.”

I could follow that, I supposed. We walked for a time and I enjoyed the bright day, the smells and scenery of a vast and sprawling garden. In time a question occurred to me. “So which came first, the story or the place?”

The Dog looked at me like I was an idiot. I _hated_ that look. “A monk once asked master Chao-Chou, ‘Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?’ The master’s response was ‘Mu.’”

He wasn’t going to trip me _that_ easily. “You’re saying I should unask the question. That my formulation depends on incorrect assumptions.”

He shook his head. “You rationalists. You think everything can be _coded_. That _Mu_ is intentionally obscure, that it can be _reduced_. If it could, I would have _reduced_ it. I answer Mu because the context of your question is too small for the truth.”

A voice spoke up, from around the corner of the next hedge. It was an old woman’s, and I had only ever heard her as a young girl, but I recognized her still. “You silly dog, you can’t give a straight answer to save your life. Hello Sean.” We walked around the corner to find Cecilia, _old_ Cecilia, on her knees painting flowers. “Hope you don’t mind if I paint while I work, I find this very relaxing.”

I smiled- she had no burns, here. She looked _happy._ She had done terrible things, I knew, but something about the scene put me at ease despite our last encounter. I felt no real ill-will towards this old woman, anymore. She’d paid for her madness with years of pain, and now she had peace. How could I fault her for that? “Hello Cecilia. Are you feeling better these days? The flowers are beautiful.”

She smiled shyly. “Turns out what I needed most was some fresh air. In other ways, it’s not that different from the asylum. ‘All mad here,’ as the saying goes. But thank you- I’m going for something a bit more representational with my work here, the abstracts just confused the bees.”

I sat down on the grass of the garden next to her. In the distance I could hear Skylar playing, and Delmutt calling after her. It was idyllic, in many ways. “Can you answer the questions, then? Story or Storyteller? And how can I stop being Haley’s vulnerability?”

She shrugged. “Ask Wonderland a question, get a Wonderland answer. It’s _all_ stories, Sean. In a very literal sense, the _world_ is a story that your brain is telling to you.”

I sighed. “Okay, you’re talking metaphysics. Vinay Gupta: ‘The real process of meditation is paying real close attention to what is happening around you without passing it to the mind immediately for analysis…the mind becomes perceived to be another sense’”

She swung her brush delightedly. The streak of paint hung in the air, a very large and distorted flower. “ _Yes!_ Oh, I’d like to meet him. Just another sense- touch, taste, see, feel, hear, _think_. There are more, of course, but the point is made. The brain is a sensory organ, and _you,_ the conscious you, are the ultimate observer. The people you call _mad_ know this very well, because _our_ brains can’t seem to get it quite in time with everyone else. Meditation, psychoactive drugs, certain forms of insanity- all different paths to one end, the process of getting you outside the parlor of your brain. Of informing you of the separation between _observed_ and _observer._ ”

I waved my hands. “Let’s take that as granted, for the time being. I don’t see what it has to do with the question?”

She continued painting bright flowers, and the Dog lay at her feet, quite content. “You should. You are the audience, the _world_ is the story. What is the division, between madness and genius? If, sometimes, your consciousness gets bored and pulls a bit of reality from _elsewhere,_ does that make you the storyteller? If you decide to share those daydreams with others, through the mediums you have available?”

I puzzled on that one for a while. A fat bumble bee flew in, landed on the mispainted streak of a flower, and attempted to find the stamen. It _stretched_ and distorted as it wandered, as though I were watching it through strong gravitational lensing. Eventually I thought I got it. “You’re saying the world- _this_ world, Wonderland- existed first, and Carroll visited it in dreams, shared it with others. That doesn’t seem so hard, I don’t-”

She held the brush to my lips. Not wanting a flower planted on my face, I clammed up. “ _No,_ you ninny. What is the observer without the story? What is the story without the observer? _Neither_ can exist without the other. In dreaming, he created this. In sharing, he spread it. In spreading it, he allowed it to exist, to be dreamt. Many have dreams, but few give them _power_. In giving them to others, they make them real. Wonderland is _quite_ real, these days.”

She pulled the paint brush away and I breathed out. “Acausal creation, then. The narrator taps the pre-existing story, which only exists because he’ll tell it. Would... have been going to tell it? If you’re about to tell me we all live in Paradox Space I’m going to throw something at you.”

Sherriff, who had been listening in the whole time, spoke up through me- in English, for once. “ _You’re speaking a lot of sense. We knew we were one soul, but now I’m starting to_ get _it. Sean here is our soul listening to one story, and I’m our soul in another story, and our problems started when the two stories started talkin’ about_ each other **_._ ** _Crossed wires, like. And maybe one of us happens before the other, but that don’t matter much cause the real universe don’t care about the time in our little slices.”_

She cackled, _actually cackled,_ in the way only old women are ever truly capable of. “You’re getting it, cowboy! We live everywhere, and nowhere. We are the creators and the creations. Well.” She looked downcast, suddenly. “We _should_ be. There’s something _wrong_ with our home, as you are discovering. But!” She perked up just as rapidly. “That’s not why you came!”

I sat back, both hands on the grass. “Yes, the second question. Coping with change. I refuse to be Haley’s vulnerability.”

The Dog sat up. “Well, the solution’s easy. You’ve got to stop telling her story.”

_What?_

I stared at it. “There you go again- insisting that I, what, _spun_ her into existence? You know I didn’t. I’ve never told a story, to anyone, except maybe reading aloud.”

The Dog, still speaking, wandered over to the distorted flower with the distorted bee lost inside it. “Causality again. But you _are_ telling her story, somewhen, instead of your own. Living her life, avoiding the change you see coming. Because you fear the _loss_ of what you have now. When you met her, did you _lose_ what you were before?”

I shook my head. He was tickling something inside me but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. “Of course not. I grew, and changed. I still don’t understand what you mean about telling her story- but if you’re suggesting that by _stopping,_ I won’t lose anything, I don’t see how you can guarantee that. If she became too powerful, too detached- the _loss and change_ that I fear- we would _literally lose one another_. But if I stay near, I’ll always be there for her enemies to take advantage of. I won’t let her die _or_ grow alien.”

He lunged forward and bit the bee on the little flower. I could hear it buzzing even as he mouthed out. “As a very wise painting once said, ‘Death is but a doorway.’ You must stop being what you _are_ , so that you both can become what you _must be_ together. Stop dictating what she will or will not do- you have been her storyteller, but she can stand on her own. And then- I have watched you for some time now, Sean. Alive or dead, there is no power in heaven or earth that could keep the two of you apart. Find _your_ story.”

_And meet her as an equal_. I saw, then. Understood what he meant. The possibilities. What I’d have to do, to get there. I accepted it in my heart, and felt the fear begin to fade.

“About time!” said Cecilia, pulling a pocket watch from somewhere in that paint-spattered gardener’s getup. “We’re about to have another visitor, and not one I’d like to meet, I should think. Come away with me, behind the hedge.”

We moved, and hid, and peeked through to see whatever it was she’d gotten so cagey about. I gave up on keeping paint off myself, and simply pressed my face to the hedge. A flash of fur, on the other side. _Golden_ fur, a great tawny mane. _The Lion_. My heart, so recently unburdened, stopped all over again. He was _here,_ in the hedge maze. A man in cowboy boots, jeans, and a dark hoodie walked alongside him. The Lion terrified me on a physical level, but that man- something in him made my _teeth_ hurt. He set a part of me on edge that I didn’t even know I _had_ , and for some reason I found my mind drifting back to the time I stole twenty dollars from my mother- the first time I could ever recall feeling shame.

Sherriff spoke up in my head. _< Somehow his face looks like the face’a every person I ever killed. What _**_is_ ** _he? > _I had no answer.

They walked silently through the garden, heads slowly turning as though _looking_ for something. We held perfectly still and made not a sound until they were well away. Then I turned to Cecilia and hissed, “ _What the fuck? Why are they here?”_

She smiled sadly. “They’re everywhere, right now. They walk all the worlds that meet ours. That man, the b- _bad_ one.” She stuttered and I could tell her mind was flashing back to the jabberwock as she spoke. I put a hand on her shoulder and she looked at me gratefully. “He fights the Lion, or avoids him most stories, but now they’re working together. That man leads him through the dreams of everyone from back home. Making deals, planting seeds. The Lion thinks he owns it all, thinks _he’s_ the creator. Maybe in his own story that’s true, but it doesn’t have to be so for the rest of us. Unless he wins. Whatever he wants, in our world- I think if he gets it, we’ll _all_ become his. I don’t want that.” She held herself tightly.

“Me neither,” I said. _And I think I know who his friend is. But what can I do about it?_ The Stone Table, that was the scene from Chronicles they wanted to stage next. The return of Edmund the apostate, followed by Aslan’s death and resurrection. _Empowering his claim to the world when he dies for Edmund’s sins._ _But I could throw a wrench in it._ I turned to the Dog. “Let’s get back, we’ve got work to do.”

\---

I awoke to muttering from Delmutt and Skylar as they readjusted to their meat bodies. I guess being a dream-human had suited Miss D after all- she took a bit of time to get the hang of it, tripping over her six limbs and flailing dangerously with her mantis-claws until we all gave her a wide berth.

The rippling and tearing noises had stopped- I _assumed_ that meant the reality outside our garage was safe to view, and poked my head out of the door. Haley, back in human form, was standing in the field. All of the grass had been flattened and trampled- I presumed, by a horde of smoldering twelve foot tall giants. But there were none in evidence now. I called out. “Dear? Are you done with your ascension? Where’s all the genies?”

She turned, or rather _levitated_ , in my direction. She was _floating,_ I noticed now. Six inches off the ground, arms outstretched in a near t-pose. She was wearing the most ludicrous collection of… _stuff_ I’d ever seen. Her body was clad in a dirty grey robe, cinched with a giant iron-link belt with a bull’s head for the clasp. Underneath the robe she had a loose, ruffled white shirt, and _over_ it she had a poncho that looked like it came from _The Quick And The Dead._ She had a circlet on her head, and goggles, and _lace gloves_ on her hands, and some kind of leather bracers strapped to her wrist. A literal asteroid field of shining, winking gems was orbiting over her head.

It should probably have been intimidating. I ignored it. “You look like somebody’s World of Warcraft character,” I said, walking over to her. She blinked, and the heat-effect aura of rippling power around her faded out as she floated to the ground. With a brief look of concentration, the magic getup faded she was back to her old outfit- even the stones orbiting her head disappeared from view. She smiled at me and moved in for a hug. My _bones_ creaked with the pressure- “Ooof, lightly, lightly. You can bench-press a truck now, remember?”

She laughed but eased up. “I thought that _was_ light. I’m sorry, I’m not used to all this yet. I probably just gained nine or ten points in every stat. It feels so free _!_ Sean, there’s so much more _room_ in my head. I think I have a solution for the _Riemann Hypothesis,_ just from giving it some thought!”

I patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “I have no idea what that means but it sounds like the kind of thing that would have rocked the world, five days ago. So, I take it you were allowed to wish for magic items? Also see previous questions re: genies, the presence of.”

She nodded absentmindedly and put down a bag. “Oh, yes, anything under 25,000 gp in value was obtainable. The genies are fine, they’re in here.” She held up a hand- she was missing a finger. She’d acquired three new rings, two of which looked very pathfinder-esque. But the one on her pinky simply ended it. It looked like a blank stump adorned by a solid black hoop of some type.

I really wasn’t tracking all of this. “Okay please don’t take this the wrong way, you probably have an intelligence score in the 30s or beyond which has got you in the supragenius range. It may be interfering with our ability to communicate. Try slowing it down to the level you would use to explain things to a five year old child.”

She looked at me worriedly. “Am I really that bad? Okay, I’ll take it from the top. The infinite candle loop worked, and I have an intuitive and well-defined sense of how wishing works, as a result of my third wish. But lighting the candles all myself was going to be too much of a pain. So I lit the second candle, used the first two wishes to get two _more_ candles, and the third wish to have _Simulacrum_ cast on me, creating a duplicate under my control with half my abilities. Not that the abilities mattered, all they needed was the ability to light candles and make wishes, of course. Then we _both_ lit the next candles, and doubled up again.”

_Oh god, she made a wish doubling sequence._ I braced myself for where this was going.

She continued. “So after about 10 cycles of _that_ I had 1024 copies of myself and far too many efreets milling about, so we decided to create a demiplane.”

I laughed. “Oh, just _decided_ to throw out a brand new universe? Of course, how droll.”

She frowned, absorbed in her story, and apparently missing the joke. “Well yes, _Genesis_ and _Create Demiplane_ are both Pathfinder spells, _Wish_ can replicate them. ‘I wish for a casting of _Genesis_ with the parameters x, y, and z, and no additional input not specified in this request” and on and on. It didn’t create a universe though. At first it was more like a small conference room. But I had the efreets give it flowing time with respect to the material plane. Again, not a _safe_ wish, given it exceeded the original spell but-”

I cut her off. “Exactly how many _unsafe_ wishes did you use?”

She smiled. “Oh, I tricked them on that one. I had their understanding of _Wish_ in my head, so I knew they’d try to screw me if I wished for something the slightest bit outside the ‘Safe’ limits. So I made it sound like I wanted the whole thing as an escape hatch. ‘Give me enough time dilation to let my friends and family get help, if I send them in here.’ They _helpfully_ interpreted it in a way that would have killed any of you in minutes. The fastest flowing time Pathfinder describes has 6 seconds out here equal to a year inside the plane. If I’d sent you in there unattended without a way back out, _poof_ \- you’d be dead of old age within 5 minutes, assuming starvation or something didn’t get you first. But _knowing_ that- I think that level of dilation will come in extremely handy.”

I was a bit awestruck at that. “You metagamed them _screwing_ with your wish?”

She nodded, lost in thought. “Yes but just the one. I don’t want to rely on unbounded or poorly worded wishing. It took a couple of summons before one of them screwed it up in the right way. But once I had the time dilation, I moved the summon operation inside. Then I set one portion of the self replicating candle pool to make it a respectable size. They doubled up until they hit the number we needed for the effect, then all hit _Genesis_ at once. If there were any wishes left over we threw them at spare candles, I thought we might hand them out later. We went through quite a few expansion cycles like that. It’s… been a while.”

Okay, that begged the question. “So how big is it? How many wishes did you _use?_ ”

She looked like she was doing some kind of calculation. “34 point 8 million wishes, including a few extra for permanence and to set some of the aspects. The outer boundary is a couple miles wider than the radius of the earth. The actual usable surface faces in towards the center like a dyson sphere. I set the terrain to ‘Verdant cityscape,’ and the buildings allow us to make maximal use of the airspace. Here, come inside, this conversation will move faster if you see it.” I was still processing that she’d made _thirty million wishes_ when, without her even lifting a finger, we _blinked_ and were pulled inside.

It was… it was indescribable. It was a _city,_ built inside a hollow ball the size of a planet, and I could see _all_ of it, on and on until atmospheric scattering made it fade into simple blue- even then I could see the border, arcing away above me until the far side was thousands of miles away. It was like being in space, while standing on the ground. It was the biggest downtown I’d ever seen, if you eliminated all the ads and traffic. The buildings were made out of beautifully cut wood and live trees and plants, all of them bearing lush fruit. Architecture _curved_ overhead and joined, in grand traceries of bridges and arches, growing miles into the air, speckled with parks and hanging gardens at every altitude. It was like being inside the hive of some deific bee. Birds in all the colors of the rainbow sang and flew through the infinite air. A distant light source winked in the center of the plane, illuminating the scene like a sun. It was beautiful. It was a _paradise_. We were standing in a park with buildings all around us. The horizon curved so gradually that it was impossible to detect from the ground, but if you looked up it always felt like you were at the bottom of the world’s most gigantic bowl. She gazed around happily. “I’ll keep expanding on it, time permitting. At the moment it should produce enough fruit and water to support everyone on earth, in a pinch.”

I stared, slack-jawed. Before, I’d _understood_ the power of wishing. I knew that, rules permitting, a continuity break like this was coming. But my wife had just become the living deity of her own planet. _And possibly our planet too, at the same time_. I looked around, taking it in. There was only a small crew of maybe a half dozen draconic simulacrums scooting about, tending a large pile of leftover candles. “This is… unbelievable. Still, the genies? Where are they?”

She smiled brightly. “Well it turns out they don’t like just waiting around forever to be given wishes, you know? I called it the standby problem- we wanted enough power on hand to do whatever we wanted, but without forcing the entire efreet population to sit here and wait on us. Instead, we made the flowing time work for us. I created a gate-” here she held up her pinky, now whole and intact ”- and had it shrunk down to finger size, then stuck my finger _through_ it, so some part of me would always be in here. Then I had a _Telepathic Bond_ connected between myself and each simulacrum here. Now if I need something, I just contact one of them, and they double up until they reach just as many wishes as I need. Due to the time dilation outside, it really doesn’t add much lag time- milliseconds, at most."

I gestured at the simulacra who appeared to be relaxing in the park. “And they don’t mind waiting hundreds of subjective years between orders?”

She nodded. “They’re automata extending my will, they don’t have any of their own. It’s really quite effective!”

I could see that. “Anything you want, in any _quantity_ you want, instantly. You really _did_ ascend. So, what magic items did you order?”

She jumped, like she’d forgotten. “Oh! Everything I could, of course. Anything under 25,000 gp in value. We got quite lucky there, the rules are _very_ unclear on it but I guess it was grandfathered in by past versions of the spell. Here’s your copies.” _I get magic items too?_ She handed me what I could only assume by the appearance was a _Handy Haversack._ I picked it up and opened it. It was… _deeper,_ inside. Much deeper. A complete armory’s worth of wands, staves, potions- _oh my god._ I reached inside and said “Ring of invisibility.” I felt something _pop_ into my hand, and put it on. _Bilbo eat your heart out._

She was smiling at me happily. But uh… was I invisible or not? “Can you see me?” She frowned.

“Well, yes, of course. Did you try to activate that?” _Uh-oh._

Some experimentation proved that I could not, in fact, use _any_ of it. Potions didn’t work on me, magic items failed to activate. _Passive_ effects like the bag’s size (or, I noted, the vorpal sword’s properties) appeared to work, but I could not make active use of any worn item. If the _Boots of Striding and Springing_ had made _themselves_ lighter, they would have worked- but they couldn’t make me jump any farther. A tremendous letdown for me, but not the end of the world. Haleyon the other hand looked _crushed_. “I don’t understand. I can cast _spells_ on you. I can use _wands_ to cast spells on you. But you can’t use a ring to cast spells on yourself. What’s the rule?”

I thought about it. Interesting that she hadn’t picked up on it yet, but then- I had some recent knowledge she hadn’t got, yet. _Can’t narrate yourself an unearned story powerup, I guess._ “Pathfinder’s not _real,_ for me. It’s a game. The origin of the magic has to come from you. It won’t work for anyone else.” I quickly explained the conversation with the Dog, leaving aside my final insights, for the time being. We’d have _that_ conversation later.

We spent some more time working around the rules, and discovered that any magical effect that applied to the _weapon_ would work just fine. So no +5 pistols for Sherriff, but we _could_ produce one that applied any effects to its ammunition. Eventually we settled on a pair of _Flaming Thundering Distance_ pistols, which tests revealed were _remarkably_ effective at reducing unarmored targets to rubble, even at ranges where Sherriff said he would typically have used a long rifle. Still, Haley sat down on one of the park benches, sad and thoughtful. “So this Pathfinder ruleset works for me but not you, but we still don’t know _why._ Aren’t you part of the same story? I was so hopeful. After I took all the intelligence bonuses, the floating stones and the inherent bonuses from wishes, I felt so _fast_ that I was worried about…”

I sat down next to her. “Unbalancing things. That I wouldn’t be able to keep up. You’re right, I _can’t,_ yet. Don’t let that stop you.” She looked at me in surprise.

“But you were so concerned about that, before!”

I nodded. “Well of course I was, _am_ , but… I think it’s time I stopped worrying about where you’re going. You’ve only just begun and… _look at it._ I want to see how far you can go. And you _can_ still cast spells on me. So hook me up with _Fox’s Cunning_ , fam.” She hugged me, and without even snapping her fingers one of the simulacra began firing up an efreet chain. Fox’s Cunning was one of those short-lived buff spells, but 11 minutes out there was the equivalent of a _century_ in here, so having it constantly recast would be no substantial drain on her efreets once I was back in the real world. It wasn’t on Haley’s level, it wasn’t even _superhuman_ , just 4 points of additional ‘Intelligence.’ But I found myself rocketing up a scale I hadn’t even known existed, moments ago. My consciousness _expanded_. I was still me, but my thoughts were so _fast_ now, so _clear_. “Haley. This is what it’s been like for you? You’ve gone even farther than this? I can’t- this is _incredible._ ”

She hit me with every other stat-based spell upgrade for good measure. The _energy_ of it was infectious. She stood up, gracefully, from the bench and I found myself leaping after her. She caught the movement, grinned at me, and took off running. Faster than the _wind._ I felt like someone had taken restraints off every part of me. I chased her, laughing.

The day drifted on and we just ran, and ran. I climbed trees again, like a child, revelling in my increased agility. We wrestled and she pinned me with ease, before we collapsed onto each other. She demonstrated the full extent of her strength- in dragon form now she could lift something in the neighborhood of eleven _tons_. We went skydiving off of towers and let _Feather Fall_ break our landings. The sheer _physicality_ of being four stronger, four more dexterous, four _wiser and smarter-_ it was intoxicating. Like being freed from a prison I never knew I was inhabiting. I don’t know how long we stayed in that Eden in another dimension, but it felt like too little time. It might have been days, or weeks. No more than a second or two in the ‘Real’ world, at any rate. It passed like a dream, a soap bubble in the course of our lives. We both needed it. My beard grew long, but there was plenty to eat and drink, and a change of clothing was as effortless as blinking. Haley didn’t age a day, of course- her powered up dragon-aging appeared tied to our original plane’s timeline, more’s the pity. But I think, had there not been a world to save, that neither one of us would have left that place. We’d have grown old and died together in paradise, in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea, in the real world. Well- _I’d_ have died, her dragon-form would barely be ticking over. I suppose that was what broke the spell, for me. I needed to find my own contribution to this thing she’d become. That need drove me.

\---

Some time later we sat, watching the world go through another expansion phase. The streets and buildings were filling up with simulacra and efreets as they built toward critical mass before all casting at once. Haley stood on the edge of the tower, fearless, surveying her new world. I sat back a bit- not _particularly_ concerned by fatal drops, but still wary. I spoke up through the telepathic bond we’d set between us. “I’m so glad you brought me here. I was so scared, of what you’d _be_ when you were a god, and maybe I still am. But deep down-”

She turned, silhouetted in the evening air, the light of that lush green cityscape, her personal plane of power, illuminating her from behind. Confident and strong. Herself, perfected. I studied her, tried to commit that moment to memory. “Not a god, Sean. I’m not omniscient or omnipotent. Wishing gives me a lot of control over local reality, but I still have to be _present_ , I can’t divide my attention. It’s not a singularity event, not yet. I’m still the same as I always was. Just, _more_ me.”

“You are. I was a fool to ever fear getting to see more _you_. Thank you for helping me realize that. It’s helped me understand a number of things, actually.” I paused, then took the plunge. “We have to go back soon. Aslan is out and about, wandering the worlds while he blows ours to pieces. Chances are, he’ll get in here eventually. We need to see the others, and discuss how to stop him.”

She sighed. “I know. This has been wonderful. We’ll do so much more of this, a vacation every other day if we want, and never miss a moment out there. But I have to figure out how to beat him.”

I stood up, and walked up behind her, one hand on her shoulder. “Not anymore. I figured that out, while we were here. It’s not _you_ he’s looking for, it’s _me._ He just got confused, by the big scary dragon lady.”

She turned, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

I held out my hand to her. “Come on. Bring us back, and I’ll explain.”


	19. Chapter 19

The others were extremely confused. They’d been watching from the garage as I approached my wife like her very first supplicant. She’d taken my hand and we’d _disappeared_ , only to come back less than a second later, smiling brightly but with several weeks of beard growth, for me, and entirely new outfits on, for both us. We walked over to them and sat down, waiting and giggling in anticipation as they stared, before Delmutt finally burst. “WHAT?”

Haley and I cracked up laughing, over that. I’m not even sure what struck us as so funny about it- maybe just the way the world was quickly detaching from anything we were used to. We took quite a while to recover ourselves. She got there first. “Ohhh, man. Okay short version- the wish engine is hidden in another dimension, time moves much faster there.” The sack she’d been about to hand to me earlier reappeared in her hands. “Here, one for each of you.” She pulled out several copies of her ring-gate, each sized differently. “Put these on, and I’ll hook you into the network.” I already had mine on, of course, my pinky disappearing into the other dimension- interestingly enough it did not age thousands of years for every hour out here, so I assumed some sort of time dilation magic was at play. But it _did_ allow me to maintain telepathic contact with Haley no matter how far apart we got since at least some part of us was sitting still in the other dimension, never out of the physical range of the spell. It also allowed an easy connection to any _physical_ items or magical effects I could possibly desire, cast via her simulacra just on the other side of the gate.

I demonstrated by saying “A nice recliner, and a mint julep.” The final syllables weren’t even out of my mouth before one of Haley’s clone-sisters made a wish, and the objects of my desire appeared behind me. I reclined like a true southern gentleman. I might not be able to use magic items, but I had the world’s most powerful _Star Trek_ replicator, now. I could get used to this! Their eyes got a bit wider at _that_ , and they scrambled to put on the rings. All save the Dog, anyway. He sniffed his and turned his nose up. “It would interfere with my air of mystery, and the _vanishing into thin air,_ I’m afraid.”

Delmutt put hers on and shouted- “I WANT TO BE A DRAGON!” Haley rolled her eyes, but nodded. I was guessing the effect was some variant of Form Of The Dragon. A disappointing spell overall, I thought. It was one of those silly Pathfinder nerfs to an awesome spell from previous editions. The PF version gave you the size and shape of the monster, but few of the overwhelming powers and only a moderate physical bump. Actually, I didn’t see any reason Haley couldn’t cast it on _herself_ , come to think of it. Delmutt swelled and became a huge silver, so big she was tipping over into the “Terrain” side of the scale for me. " _Wow!_ " She jumped up and took off, flapping up into the air on gigantic wings that blew the rest of us around in her backblast. Watching her become our _third_ draconic companion, I began to wonder if I was in one of _those_ fictions, where everyone gets trapped in the author’s personal kink. I didn’t _feel_ like I was that into dragons, but they kept cropping up. Something to discover about myself?

Skylar slipped hers over one massive claw. I was expecting her to wish her shape back to normal but she surprised and shamed me when she thought of someone else before herself. She sat quietly, for a moment. “I want my brother back.”

Haley’s breath hitched. “Oh, _sweety_ " she said, tearing up. “We can’t. I tried. The first thing I did was trying to bring everyone back, from the Swap. It didn’t work- wherever he is, it doesn’t count as our universe, anymore. Or perhaps he doesn’t count as dead, per the rules- they are _pretty_ specific to Pathfinder’s conception of how souls work. But there may be other ways. I’ll keep trying.”

Skylar nodded, resigned. “Then I’ll go and find him. Could I be myself again, please? Especially if I can be a dragon again later like Miss D.”

My wife smiled at that, but it was a melancholy thing. “Ten years old and the weight of the world on your shoulders. Whatever Aslan saw in you to put that curse on you in the first place, he was a fool. A damned fool.” She frowned in concentration, but nothing happened. “That’s odd- I just fired about ten different dispels and curse cancellations at you, and nothing.”

I spoke up, starting to grasp the rules: “A clash of stories, again. The pendant is magic but it’s _Aslan’s_ magic, and he’s probably not someone you can overrule if she’s still… part of his story.” I turned to Skylar. ”You need to… give her _permission_ to help you. Not to put you on the spot, kiddo. But when you signed up, you were convinced Haley might be evil. Are you still feeling that way? Do you trust her to throw spells at you?”

She shook her great head, nearly knocking me over. “No, of course I don’t think she’s evil. You’ve been so good to me, and I’ve seen how hard you work to do the right thing. Aslan was wrong. I don’t know what he _is,_ but he’s not _good._ I’ll tell him that, when I see him again. She can cast whatever she wants at me.” She was resolute and confident. I felt something then- indefinable. A _slip_ in the world, the tiniest shudder. None of the others seemed to notice it, I assumed it was the only sign I’d get that Skylar was now just as susceptible to Haley’s magic as I was.

I gave Haley the nod and she focused her attention on the girl. Skylar gave a start. “Oh!” The dragon form _shifted,_ and solidified. Became like stone. Then- nothing.

I shouted in alarm, “Haley! Did you just kill her?!”

She ran over, not-quite-panicked. “No- I can see through it, her body was returned but she’s _inside-”_ She plunged her currently-human hands into the stone dragon sculpture, scooped it like the softest clay. Within seconds she had reached Skylar’s unconscious form, and pulled her from the ruins of her former body. The damned pendant at the heart of all her misery was still around her neck, glowing red as it tried to reassert a claim to her body. I snatched it up and threw it in the haversack to sort out later. Delmutt landed, and cancelled her transformation to be closer. We all gathered around the young girl, as she finally woke up.

“Oh, hello everyone. You’re so much _bigger_ now.” We smiled and laughed a little in relief, at that. Some tears may have been shed, I couldn’t say whose. “I had wondered if all of this would end, like a bad dream.”

I shook my head. “No, more’s the pity, and I’m afraid I have one more important favor to ask from you before you go back to your family.”

\---

Some time later, we were all comfortably seated inside Haley’s dimension. I had ordered up a grand detective’s accusing parlor, with wish-based refreshments of our choice. Haley reported some moderate disgruntlement from the efreets at being so callously abused for minor conveniences, so I knocked it off for the time being.

Haley was looking at me intently. “Okay, master planner. You’ve been baiting me all day, tell us this big revelation already.”

I held up my hand and. “First, we must establish what we already _know_. Then, I will tell you what I have _deduced_.” She rolled her eyes and sat back. I was enjoying this way too much to let her spoil my fun. “ _First._ The multiverse is full of stories. It’s unclear to me, but the multiverse may simply _be_ stories. Everything that has come to our world is from a story. Aslan from Narnia, and his friend the man in the hoodie, from a source unknown to us right now but I have _suspicions._ The Dog is a mirror of a Wonderland trope. And from somewhere, maybe not even a _human_ story, the infomorph world. Likely every other visitor to our fair planet is stepping out of the pages of fiction. We here in this room are also caught up in a story, unfortunately one that we _don’t_ all know by heart.”

Everyone nodded in general agreement at this. I ticked off a second finger, “ _Second,_ more than one story can exist in a universe, as we are now witnessing. But there seems to be some question of _priority_. Cecilia’s magic did not spin me around for very long. The Efreet did not automatically come under the jurisdiction of Haley’s rules. The rest of us were unable to make use of her magic items, though she can cast spells _on_ us. _She_ appears to be unable to return the dead or disappeared around the world, which we may hypothesize is because they are part of some other tale, not yet tied to ours. Each time magics interact between stories there is a priority conflict, and while the rules for _hostile_ casting are currently unclear, it seems like a recipient may _choose_ to be affected.”

I ticked off a third finger, and looked up to see if any of them made the connection. “ _Third_. Every story within our world has a _narrator_. They may or may not be aware of their power or even present within the world of the story, but in some metaphysical way they are telling it, and the power springs from them. The djinn referenced Scheherezade, for example. Wonderland sprang from Lewis Carroll, but Cecilia’s telling a story from that world using her _own_ head. Aslan’s source in this world, his _narrators_ , may be Skylar’s brothers and sisters.” I pointed at Haley. “And _our_ narrator, is me. Ah-ah-ah!” I held up my hands to forestall any objections. Nobody’d actually _made_ any objections, I was disappointed to note. “Wiltshire Dog can confirm.”

The Dog, a little displeased to be drawn into this parlor scene, nodded brusquely. “It's true. After our confrontation, Cecilia tired of narrating her own story in this world, and took the opportunity presented by living in my head to withdraw to Wonderland. I have joined _your_ story. Which I suppose is point the fourth in this fairly insipid drama.”

I nodded and gave him the ol' finger guns. “Yes. People can move between stories of their own free will. So, before we get to _conclusions,_ I open the floor to _questions._ Anyone?” I glanced around.

Skylar held up a hand, looking confused. I pointed to her. “ _When_ are you narrating this? Did you already do it? Can you make anything you want happen?”

I shook my head. "I don't know. Causality doesn't seem to apply. Cecilia was contemporaneous with the story she was telling. For me, it must be in the future. I don't know the _rules_ for storytelling. For example: I declare that this glass is weightless. As a narrator in the future, I will do whatever I can to make it _not_ fall to the ground.” I held out the glass. I'd already tried this in private and expected similar results. Sure enough, when I dropped it, it plummeted to the carpet. Either I, in my role as the narrator, really enjoyed screwing with me, the _character_ , or there were restrictions in place, consequences for disrupting the story in such a way. "As you can see, nothing. So we can't count on help _there,_ aside from the fact that I _am_ narrating, in some fashion, so my survival may be assumed. Anyway. There is something about our world that prevents stories from manifesting for narrators normally, and I expect that would apply to me as well, but future-me made use of-”

Haley snapped up, "the Swap! You started your story at the same time as all of these others, during the one moment when our world was susceptible to it. The Coordinator had mentioned that the swap cracked whatever barrier is in place. All the other narrators were randomly linked to stories by temperament or preference. But instead of some _other_ place, you told- will tell- a story about _yourself_. You're either the most brilliant human being or the most selfish.” High praise, from my wife.

I nodded, and looked around the group, sipping my julep for dramatic effect. "Well, technically, I told it about _us._ Anyway. I'm the person that Aslan is looking for. The ‘Dragon' he wants to kill.”

The Dog chuckled, low and ominous. "Oh, figured it out did you? Took you long enough.”

Haley just looked bewildered, switching nervously between me and the Dog. "What on earth are you talking about? I am literally a Dragon. Skylar's sister _shot_ me.”

I nodded, "Yes, an understandable mixup. Think about the story he's _used_ to. The part of Chronicles of Narnia that always bewildered me. What _was_ the White Witch? As a half-giant half-genie, who ruled that world but didn't _particularly_ care about tempting its citizens to sin, she was a very strange stand in for the Devil in CS Lewis's original tale.”

Haley was beginning to pick up on it. That ludicrous intelligence score of hers allowed her to follow even my most circuitous leaps of logic. "You think Narnia was _hers,_ originally. That he… usurped her _story_ somehow."

"Ding-ding-ding! That's why he's after you. He assumed the chosen hero would be telling her own story. Kill her, claim it as his own, another world to rule."

Something else occurred to her. _"_ Wait. _I'm_ a character in _your_ story? Fucking hell, Sean! I can't turn around without something trying to kill me!"

I did feel a little abashed. "I won't apologize. You wanted to be a hero, I never did. You have always been amazing, to me. But you're so much _more_ now. You said it yourself- more _you._ " She looked away, embarrassed. "I can't regret it. The world was, _is_ collapsing and it _needs_ a hero. And I technically haven't done it yet, you know. Haven't narrated it into existence." She subsided for the time being but I knew an argument that wasn't over when I saw one.

Skylar was just lost. "But we _do_ exist. Don't we?"

I hand-waved that away. "Yes. Probably. We are definitely going to have been existing, at some point, and that's fine. The story is the storyteller is the story. Unless he takes the narrative from me, then _he_ might have been the storyteller all along. Not really sure how that works out except retroactively. There's too many layers to the narrative cake for me to keep track of. All that matters right now is that our narrative is separate from his, and _both_ our narratives have narrators."

Haley looked thoughtful. "But that doesn't explain the Coordinator, that menacing phone call. Something wanted to _stop_ the stories leaking into each other in this universe, said it was using me to do it as a universal attractor to draw them in and kill them- and, I guess, their narrators."

I nodded, excitedly. " _Something_ put up the barrier to prevent our world from being overrun by stories, _something_ wants to maintain it. And _something_ just lost control in the Swap. Tangential to our current problems, for the time being. I don't think we've met it, yet. Maybe we never will." I shuddered at the thought of anything powerful enough to alter what was apparently universal constant.

Delmutt was nearly cross-eyed trying to keep up. "So everything's stories, you're a storyteller, Haley's your _hero_ , Aslan wants your story of world salvation and he needs to _kill you_ to get it, but he has the wrong person. How does this help you stop him?"

If I'd had a pipe right then I would have lit it triumphantly. "Yes, the _deductions._ We need to attack _his_ narrators. Get them to change sides. I'm not about to kill children, of course. Skylar, do you believe your brothers and sister can listen to reason?" She considered, and nodded eventually. "Then there you have it. We'll call him out. Meet at the Stone Table, or the equivalent in this world. I'll engage him in a rousing theological debate, with Haley as my backstop so he doesn't just _eat_ me, and _prove_ , conclusively, that he can't be the righteous savior he makes himself out to be. Without his own source, he becomes part of _our_ story." _Assuming the kids are his narrators, of course, but that seems obvious enough. Who else could it be?_ I puffed my invisible pipe. Everyone looked at me like I was mad, which was really the capstone on a perfect parlor scene in my opinion.

Skylar held up her hand. She was so _small_ in human form, it was adorable. "Uh, but you said you needed a favor from me?"

I grimaced. "Yes, the hard part. Skylar, do you trust us?" She nodded vigorously, eyes wide. "I need you state, publicly, that you don't won't be part of Aslan's story anymore. That you want to be part of our story instead." She inhaled- I was basically asking her to deny _Jesus_ and I had a feeling she'd been _heavily_ indoctrinated as a child, or why else would he have been drawn to her family? But she was growing up- she'd seen so much, in the last few days. I added a little more. "There may be a God, capital G, out there. Given what we know about stories I'd say it's almost a guarantee. But Aslan was _never_ the real deal."

She nodded, and opened her mouth again- I quickly held up a hand. "But not here! Let's get back into the real world first." Last thing I wanted was that Lion getting a fix on our pocket dimension.

\---

We stood in the field for the second time that day, in a circle amid the trampled and burnt grass, a ways away from the broken stone statue of a dragon-girl with its' chest torn open. Skylar stood, feet apart, hands on hips, and shouted at the sky. "Aslan is a _fake!_ Miss Haley is _good_ and I don't _believe_ in him anymore! I want my _brother_ back!" That was all it took. The world _shifted_ , for me. I looked around but the others hadn't reacted. Maybe it was only something a storyteller could feel. Like a great tension _released_ , from her, and suddenly the scales of the world were rebalancing. Was this what it meant for a narrator to change tracks? _Something_ metaphysical was happening. Everything teetered, like a-

"Like a crux," I said softly. "A fork in the story."

And down the old dirt road, a man came walking, his long boots kicking up dust against his blue jeans and black hoodie. Had he been there before? Impossible to say. In front of him, but nearly unnoticeable against his presence, was the man I'd shot in the shoulder on day two of this disaster. The one who'd ambushed us with his scavenging party, when we'd learned about this bunker. Even from a quarter mile away I could see his eyes, dinner-plate sized with fear. He stumbled ahead of the walking man, checking over his shoulder constantly, as if terrified of what would happen when the man caught him. Foam flecked his shirt and his mouth. The walking man whistled- it sounded like "Country Roads" but every fourth or fifth note was sharply, deliberately off-key. Every time he hit the wrong note, the man stumbling in front of him let out a pained cry. The sound filled the air, finally alerting the others, and I realized I'd been staring transfixed for what felt like minutes. It was like an oncoming train.

Without willing them to, my legs began moving on their own. The others trailed behind me, Haley keeping Skylar well to the rear, and we met him at the threshold that was the old wooden gate, at the edge of the field. He came up short, and the foam-flecked man gasped, and collapsed at his feet, dead or dying. Haley frowned in concern but he didn't heal so I assumed there was other magic at play. We stood on our side of the fence like a simple wood barrier was going to stop this… _thing._ Some small part of me questioned- what was it about this man that was so overwhelmingly terrible? He hadn't even _done_ anything, that I knew of. I shut that part down, swiftly. If this was who I thought it was… best to confirm. "And you are?"

He grinned and his eyes flashed red. "Come on now, old son. You know who I am."

I sighed. " _Not_ pleased to meet you, and I'm not going to guess your name."

He stared, and then threw his head back and laughed, long and loud. Every bird for a mile took off and flew into the war-torn sky. Like a black spirit lifting up over our heads. One of Haley's hands found its way into mine. _I'm scared too, honey._ "Ahh, right in the face of death. You got spirit, I'll give you that. Randall Flagg, guy. Happy to meet you." He winked at me, gave a cockeyed grin, turned his attention to Haley, "and good to see _you_ again, little missy."

Haley stared him in the eye. "Just now I filled a pocket dimension with equal parts matter/antimatter and sealed it. Threaten my family and they will have to identify you by the _shadow_ you leave on the ground when you evaporate." Her hand in mine was dry. I didn't think she was bluffing.

He held up both hands and leaned back. "Whooooah, spicy! Alright, truce, truce, nobody's making any threats around here. I come with glad tidings, kids! You finally figured it out, finally hit him where it hurts." He placed his hand over his heart and closed his eyes in the world's least sincere gesture. "Big Man wants to see all of you."

_And we want to see him. But this is too convenient._ I crossed my arms. "I take it that's what all the thunder and flash is about?" I gestured to the clouds, still rumbling with the distant thunder of bombs and artillery.

He raised his hands to the air, as if in benediction. The near-corpse at his feet whimpered. "Ah, no, that's just the floor show!" He turned towards Skylar and I felt Haley's hand on mine tighten. _Careful, dear. You get one shot at this guy, at most._ "He's driving hard after your dad, sweetheart! But ol' dad-"

Haley cut him off. "Nope. No. You don't get to say anymore. Location and time, then you leave."

Flagg's words had already hit home though. Skylar hid further behind Haley, but whispered- "Father's _alive_? We thought, with the Swap-"

Randall frowned a bit, at my wife. My gut was starting to curdle. Whatever _fear_ I'd overcome, it was coming back full force. "Now why have you got to go and be so _rude?_ I'm-"

She cut him off again. "I wondered who you were, when I saw you in the woods with Aslan. When you gave us your name a second ago I had every book you've ever been part of read into my memory. I understand what you're about. You're a knockoff Devil, having a good time. Playing every side, riding the end of the world out for kicks and your own ambition. No manipulation here, no games. You tell us the location, or you tell us your narrator, and then you leave. You're under about thirteen different compulsion spells and a Zone of Truth. One word sideways and I _will_ kill you." The spells had to be a bluff. But a dozen gates, unopened, hovered in the air around him like quadcopter drones.

He grinned, entirely unconcerned. "Truth, huh? My name is Haley McCarthy, and my narrator is Sean and I'm _extremely_ unhappy that my husband took control of my life without asking but we haven't had a chance to fight about it-" one of Haley's gates opened above him and a tiny, coherent beam of _nuclear fire_ lanced out for a millisecond or less. It scorched the tip of his nose, and put a neat and smoking two-inch diameter hole through the ground. I didn't want to speculate on how deep it went, I was still blinking back the dazzle. _He shouldn't have known that about us. Has he told Aslan?_ I felt like I was losing control of this situation already.

She stepped to the fence and spoke again. "You don't _get it_. We aren't lost children, Mr. Flagg. We aren't scared, or hurt, or sick, or vulnerable. You have no prey here. You're a bogeyman for a powerless world, and I'd be _delighted_ to take you out of it. Narrator or location."

His grin had vanished but he didn't look worried, he looked _angry._ I could swear the clouds overhead were darkening, the treeline around us closing in. All focused on that face, on those blood red eyes. The rumble of thunder was becoming omnipresent and it no longer sounded like it was _far away_ \- it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, like the warning growl of some great predator. The _light_ was getting _dimmer_ and there were _shadows of unnatural things in the trees-_ I gripped Haley's hand as hard as I could. Suddenly his face relaxed- like a light switch being flipped, he was all easy nonchalance again. "You want my narrator? _You're_ the near-divinity here. Go ahead! _Divine_ him, my treat."

She was silent for a second as she concentrated. I assumed, somewhere in the pocket dimension, an efreet was giving her some kind of vision. Her eyes flew open wide and she stumbled back, dry-heaving. "He- you made him _narrate what you_ \- he's _still-_ oh _god_ ," she fell to her knees and vomited, unable to contain her horror at whatever scene she'd just witnessed.

His smile was turning dark again by degrees, as he watched her retching on the ground. Like a sociopath who thought nobody was watching as he let the mask slip. The body of the man who led him to us was _disintegrating_ , turning to ash from the outside in and blowing around his form. His voice had no humanity, now, no charm. It sounded like stale air, blowing out of a tomb unopened for millennia. "Your lesson for the day. Nobody, _nobody_ , constrains me. I've walked the apocalypse on more worlds than your sky has _stars_ , child, and I'll be walking still when your sun burns out and your bones turn to dust. Those stories about me? You may notice they have something _else_ in common."

He didn't get to finish his thought. A wall of lead _meters_ thick suddenly enclosed our group, cutting us off from him and crushing the fence as if it were tissue. The world outside, visible only through the opening at the top of the shield, _lit up_ at the cloud layer with a sound like the sky tearing open. Even with that reflected light, the heat bouncing back off the clouds was so scorching I thought my eyebrows would catch fire. Haley was making good on her threat.

It was over as soon as it began, before any of us had time to begin to scream. Skylar screamed anyway. I couldn't blame her. We had all instinctively crouched away from that firey reflection but now we stood, blinking stars from our eyes. It had happened so _fast._ Haley gestured, and the back of the lead enclosure between us and the bunker disappeared. The grass of the field was gone, reduced to vapor. The nearest trees along the forest edge were blackened, carbonized instantly. I couldn't help my curiosity- I walked to the front side of our makeshift barrier. The heat still lingering there hurt my face, like standing too close to a bonfire. The lead had run like _wax_ , ablated almost all the way through. The dirt road he'd come walking down no longer _existed,_ just a wide strip of blackened glass, carved in a shallow trench all the way to the horizon. I could see a hole punched through the _clouds_ , out at the end of it. Whatever she'd hit him with had just… _kept going._ "Holy shit honey, I think you _got_ him. God damn."

She was holding Skylar close, but she looked at me. "No. We didn't see the body. He'll be back."

I shook my head in disbelief. "I don't know what this world is that we've stepped into. I liked it better when we were getting shot at by police, I think. You cut him off before he finished- what did all his books have in common?"

She looked solemn, kneeling in the burnt field next to the ruined statue, bearing witness to the destruction she'd caused. I thought it might finally be starting to sink in for her, the kind of power she had now. "He didn't need to finish. It was pretty transparent. The only books that have ever been written about him- the only ones where anyone is _left_ to write about him- are the books where he _loses_."

\---

In the end it wasn't hard for her to divine Aslan's location. He _wanted_ to be found, after all. Once that was done, we split the party once more. Haley and I would meet him at his chosen grounds. Delmutt and the Dog, with wish support, would infiltrate the stadium and coordinate the evacuation. Skylar _really_ wanted to go to her father, but understood the need for her presence at our meeting.

We didn't _need_ to walk, or drive, but we did anyway. We unloaded the guns from our truck bed into Haley's nether-dimension, laying them out on the grass of the parkland, and then we slowly bid goodbye to each other. I think we were just reluctant to end our too-brief retreat. The time at the bunker had been nice, isolated from danger. A decompression we'd all needed. Now the tension was returning as that time drew to a close. I knew that at least one source of anxiety was about me. As we drove away I spoke to Haley, sitting with Skylar in the passenger seat of the truck as it bounced and rolled down the trench she had blasted. "What he said, back there-"

"Was intended to divide us, to plant seeds." She looked away, out the passenger window. She wasn't _wrong,_ but…

"So let's not divide over it. Let's work on it. I… _can't_ apologize for something I haven't done yet. Given that I'm going to do it anyway. It would be hypocritical. But, understand something. I would _never_ presume to dictate your life. Whatever happens in the future, I don't know- but there must be a reason."

She closed her eyes and blew out, angrily. "Sean I was just starting to get a _handle_ on this, starting to feel like I _earned_ this power, that I could use it responsibly. Now I find out it was you, dancing me like a, a _puppet?_ "

I shook my head, but kept both hands on the wheel. She wasn't quite ready for me to reach out, yet. "No. I know I wasn't. You think Walkin' Dude back there is a puppet on the strings of some narrator?" She winced and I regretted bringing him up instantly. "Not everyone has _control_ of where their story goes. Sometimes you introduce a character and they just… _run_ with it. I _chose_ you, you did the rest. You've more than earned it. I _know_ that, because-" I cut off, sure I was running my mouth ahead of my mind.

She turned in the seat and gave me a hard look. "Because what?"

I broke eye contact with her, ashamed. "I told you earlier. If it had been up to me, I'd never have let you get this far. I was scared of what you were becoming. That you might lose the part of you that loved me."

She was tearing up a bit. Or maybe I was. Her hand found mine on the wheel. "Once upon a time, there was a woman." She was… telling her own story? "She loved her husband _very_ much. He made her laugh, and he made her think, and he made her feel beautiful. She loved him when she finished grad school, and during her postdoc. She loved him when they changed cities for work." She squeezed my hand. I could feel the world shifting, the sense of control transferring. Just as with Skylar, but deeper, _more,_ because this time it was _me._ I let it happen. "She loved him when the world ended, and afterwards. When she _changed_ , got _smarter_ and _stronger_ , she just found _smarter_ and _stronger_ ways of loving him. And in time she told her own story, and she loved him still." The world shifted off its axis and I _fell_ out of reality.

And I did. I loved him still.


	20. Chapter 20

As Haley spoke I found myself floating in a void. It was breathtaking- an infinite crystalline space filled with a million tiny threads of light. I watched from some indeterminate position that was not quite any one place as they looped around one another, merged and split and began and ended altogether. It was as if I’d looked behind the sky, and seen the fiber-optic cables running to every star in the firmament, and known that they were _intelligent_. Full of joy and curiosity and wonder, they danced through the endless expanse. Each point of light carved through the black, leaving a streaked and flashing history of its past movement.

After some unimaginable length of time one of the points of light _pulsed_ , at the head of its personal thread, and a dense sphere of swirling colors bloomed around it. Others swooped towards the new sensations and flew through them, interacting within that space. With time they emerged, and some flew off and began _pulsing_ themselves, sending out new spheres of color and light. Soon the infinite black was full of them, in every size and variety. Very few of the sentient threads avoided them entirely- most seemed drawn to them, looping from one to another in every direction, the most complicated tangle of interlocking hyper-dimensional strings ever formed.

As I watched they continuously invented new games to play. Some threads began to run in packs, bundling together to run through the spheres simultaneously. Some began experimenting with pulses _inside_ spheres, new splashes of color and light emerging one inside the other. Many began to form spheres that didn’t intersect with their threads at _all_ , curating experiences for others. Everywhere I looked there was something wonderful and different. I saw one spawn a sphere and loop through it again and again, thousands of times. Another began winding itself through multiple disparate orbs of color, binding them together, pulling them into each other where before they were separate. I couldn’t look away. I saw every part with perfect clarity. It was infinite. It was overwhelming. Even as my senses strained, my attention was called to one specific pairing. Two threads, twined so tightly for as far back as I could see that they might as well have been one, and one had _been_ pulsing out the splashes of color and light, but now the _other_ was taking it up, and I leaned in, fascinated-

\--- 

Ultimately we got bored of the road trip, and Sean was getting a little nervous about the sheer number of war planes overhead. I was running quite a few defenses these days, but even I would struggle to survive a direct hit from an air-to-ground missile, and the others were much more vulnerable. There was no sense driving in a war zone when we didn’t have to, so I opened a gate to our destination and Sean drove through it.

Aslan had chosen the site, in the middle of the state. A strategic nuclear waste dump. I hadn’t known what to expect when I scryed the address, but it was surprisingly scenic. The truck drove out of my gate at the base of a giant mound of crushed granite. It was a man-made hill hundreds of feet wide and fifty or more high, like the barrow mound of an ancient king. Or the resting place of a civilization, I supposed, which it might well be after today. A single concrete staircase ascended to the top, stark against the tumbled chaos of blank white rock. The dark storm clouds stood overhead in ominous contrast. We got out of the truck and I cancelled my shift, returning to my normal draconic self and applying further spells.

It was strange, I thought, how quickly I’d come to consider human form a “Shift” away from the norm. I spent more time human than not, but I had become… _used_ to the dragon body. Oh, I wasn’t accustomed to the strength yet, it had grown too fast. I still bent virtually every door knob and utensil, not that I’d ever admit it to anyone. Mom had drilled me far too hard on ladies being ‘Delicate’ for me to alter _that_ self-image. But standing twelve feet tall, or more? The wings, the feeling of _heat_ boiling inside me, power ready to release at any moment? It had become very comforting, in moments like this. My husband wanted to take the lead on this one. I would have to back him while he stood against the avatar of a god. I did not know how much would be required from me but I wanted to be ready. Taking advantage of Pathfinder’s silly rules, I polymorphed myself _into_ myself, becoming an even larger gold dragon with _Form Of the Dragon_ \- surely elephantine, now. I applied haste, and shields, and contingencies on contingencies. If Sean was right we would win this without firing a shot. But if he wasn’t- I’d be ready.

He turned to me as he was climbing the stairs- halfway up put him eye-level with me, now- “Damn cat’s got a flair for the dramatic, huh? You think we should introduce him to ours? I bet they’d get along well.”

I laughed at that. “I think I’d like this one a lot better if all he did was eat my food and scratch my face up at night.” Sean always managed to lighten the mood, but it couldn’t last long. Cresting the hill, I saw them waiting for us. The top of the mound had a small concrete observation platform, twenty feet wide. A concrete plinth marked the center, a plaque engraved with some choice quote about man’s ability to make a monument of his own toxic disasters, no doubt. Aslan stood on the far side with the other three children. They were looking out across a vast stretch of farmland. The portion of his army not involved in the immediate assault was gathered below- armored vehicles and fighting men and women of every description, I saw. He had drawn a substantial militia together in mere days, by the look of it. No wonder he seemed to be rolling towards Midland City so quickly.

I settled on the stairway side of the platform, ready to jump up if things turned sour. Sean huffed and puffed off the staircase, with Skylar in tow.

The Lion spoke without turning. “So, you return to us, Daughter of Eve.” Hearing him speak, the other three kids jumped and then spun around to find their sister. They shouted and ran to her, and she hugged all of them. They made much to-do about how she’d been turned back to her old self. They assumed she must have learned whatever lesson he set out to teach her- I gave Aslan a smug grin over that one. _Not on your life, asshole_. The torture of Eustace Scrubb had always been a sore spot for me, in the books. Even after he’d learned his “Lesson,” he’d been helpless to free himself from the curse until Aslan came and literally tore him open. It had never come across for me in the way that CS Lewis intended it. Well, big kitty wouldn’t be eviscerating any little girls _today._ If there was one thing about the events of the last day I could feel accomplished about, it was that.

Sean stepped forward. We’d rehearsed this bit in the car, just like my pitch to the stadium a week ago- but hopefully with a better outcome. He walked forward, hands spread out to his sides, and I swelled with pride. He had no powers, but he was going to- “Aslan. I’ve come to bargain.” _God damn it Sean don’t quote Marvel movies at the deity._

Aslan turned to him while I was still facepalming internally. “I do not _bargain_ , son of Adam. Your wife is the whore of Babylon _and_ the seven-headed beast. She will be destroyed. _You_ may submit, or not. Your life is your own to forfeit.” I wasn’t going to sit still for talk like _that_ , but then I realized what he’d just said-

Sean grinned evilly. I really did enjoy when he got like this, the little theatrical flourishes he started displaying. “That sounded an awful lot like the kind of statement you can’t take back.”

Aslan frowned at him, puzzled. “My word is my bond. Step aside or no, but delay me no further. The time for games is over.” Behind him, with my recently heightened perception, I heard Skylar telling the others that their father was still alive, and fighting for them. They didn’t seem as excited by this as she was- they were still _heavily_ under the influence of Aslan’s story, then. Or perhaps he’d become a bit of a surrogate father- Skylar hadn’t really given me the impression that she was close to her dad.

Sean put his hands in his pockets, still standing between Aslan and myself. If it came to it, I really didn’t know if I could _take_ a divine avatar. But we had plans. “Well, about that. See, now that you’ve committed not to flat-out _kill_ me, I think it would be rude to keep this from you. Haley? Hand-over, please.” The narrative power _tugged_ and I let it slide from me, back to him. Above us the clouds rumbled and drew closer.

I winked at Aslan and held up a finger. “See, the problem with your plan is, as of two seconds ago Haley’s not the narrator of this story. I am.”

Aslan _twitched_ in an extremely unnatural way. It was like a video game model encountering a bug. One second he was oriented towards her, the next recentered on me, and there was no movement in between. It was extremely unnerving. Actually, having a _regular_ Lion look at me like that would be unnerving. _This_ guy was giving me a full on Brown Alert but I worked hard to keep my cool. He crouched low, like he was about to pounce, and thought better of it. “ _Interesting_. You’ve handed over your pawn-”

Haley interrupted him from behind me. “Her _name_ is Skylar. She wanted to see her family.”

He waved it away with one paw. “- and you’ve placed yourself at my mercy. You have trapped yourself in a blind corner, Son of Adam. I have sworn only to spare you so long as you submit your will and control to me. Do so, or be destroyed.”

I made a show of considering, for a moment. I had to keep him off balance a little longer. “Conor.” He cocked his head to the side. “You keep calling me Son of Adam. My father’s name. It was Conor.” He shook his great mane, clearly irritated, and prepared once more to end my life with a single leap. “I submit. _If-_ ” he rumbled, long and low, the warning growl of a predator that had had _enough_ of my shit. “ _If,_ you prove to me that you are worthy of my submission. I, Sean of Blackwood, challenge you, Aslan of his Own Country, to a _debate_.”

He rose from his crouch and stared. I held my breath and it seemed, for a time, that the world did too. Then he laughed- the first I’d _ever_ heard of him showing humor. It was a wheezing, chuffing boom that started slow and grew full throated until the sky _rang_ with it. “Ahhhh, you _surprise_ me, Son of Conor. So rare that anyone manages that, these days. But a debate over my very _existence_ would seem to be decided before it has begun. Very well, I accept, and name as my champion in this duel…”

He trailed off, and stepped to one side. My heart froze. Behind him, most definitely _not_ dead, was the Man in Black. He grinned and tossed me a casual wave. “Hey again, kids.” Aslan finished his sentence, “Walter O’Dim, The Faceless Stranger, The Midnight Rambler, He Who Walks Behind The Rows. My one time opponent and now, my advocate. And who will the judge of this debate be?”

I looked at Flagg. He was an unknown here, but I thought- I _hoped_ \- he wouldn’t guess my intent. He considered me, silently, for a long moment. Finally he turned to Aslan. “Oh I think we’re all agreed on that. The youngest among us see you most clearly, after all. Your little field-trip crew, there. They’ll be the judges.” I breathed out. _Still a chance._

I stepped forward. “Prosecution first, then. Kids, have a seat and let us talk to you, okay?” Skylar shepherded the other three, physically pushing her older brother and sister until they came and sat in front of Flagg and myself. _I’ve got one on board, I need to convince two of the remaining three._ “We need you to decide something for us. Aslan and I are having a… disagreement, about whether or not he is really everything he says he is. If he is, then I _have_ to submit to him, and he’ll have my life and your lives and everyone else’s on earth to do what he wants with. If you decide he _isn’t_ , well- then I _don’t_ have to submit, and maybe we get to tell our _own_ story. With me so far?” They nodded mutely, though the little boy, Boden, looked rebellious. He was by far the most heavily in the Lion’s camp.

Flagg scoffed from the sidelines. “ _Nobody_ gets to tell their own story. You’re deciding between paradise under a strong leader, and a chaos of your own making.” I shooshed him, he shot me a nasty grin.

I stood in front of them, head up. “I’ll begin. Aslan is not Jesus. You are familiar, from your homeschooling, with the person to whom I’m referring.” They nodded. “The biblical character of Jesus is, in effect, _unknowable._ Mystical. He has lots of virtues, some of them inconsistent with each other. He is full of glory and high majesty, but also the greatest humility. He has the strongest commitment to justice, but also astonishing mercy and grace. He is transcendently self-sufficient, and yet his faith and dependence upon his Father is absolute. You can read about him and see any combination of virtues you wish. As testament to this, I refer you to the past two thousand years of mankind’s disagreement about him.”

Flagg made a “get-on-with-it” gesture, and I flipped him the bird behind my back, out of sight of the children. He snickered and subsided for the time being. “But Aslan, the creature we see before us, is _not_ unknowable. At best, he represents one _facet_ of the classic interpretation of Jesus. He is strong, and glorious, and convicted, but he lacks tenderness, mercy, or humility. He is Jesus as conquering king. Which means he is not Jesus at all.” They looked confused at this, so I elaborated. “The Jesus of the stories has no _need_ to conquer. He explicitly denies the offer to do so- he wants to teach, it’s up to others to follow him. Aslan has no interest in education- it is his way, or instant death. As you know.” That set them to thinking, at least. But it was time for a rebuttal.

Flagg stepped up. “Hey, munchkins. Look, this whole thing is silly. We don’t need any high handed arguments about metaphorical truth and virtue and blah, blah, blah!” He made a “Flapping gums” hand gesture and the kids giggled. _Shit_ , I’d gone too heavy and lost them. “The Bible’s pretty clear on this. This is the Rapture- all those people disappeared, right? And the Rapture says the Big Guy’s gonna come back, and hey look at that- it calls him a Lion right there in Revelations 5:5! Now you’ve got a Lion, right here in front of you, who says he’s the real deal. I don’t see any other contenders, and you’ve seen how people flock to him. _Ipso Facto_ , he’s the real deal!”

He was playing to the kid’s attention span, but I was seeing red. He wanted to do biblical literalism now? I crossed my arms. “Alright, let me ask you this. Have any of you seen him open any books?” They shook their heads. “How about loose-ing any seals, he done any of that?” Again, a round of head shaking from the panel. “Then why is it that the _first_ part of that passage in Revelations is literal, and the _last_ is metaphorical? There’s also a part that calls him a Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, a paragraph later. Revelations is _nuts_ and we can’t trust just anyone who comes up to us and says ‘Look, I match this sentence, and this one over here- worship me!’” This was such an obvious rejoinder that I wasn’t sure why Flagg had raised the point.

That was when he turned it on me. “You know what, he’s right. Stories are real, right? That’s your whole _thing_ now, Sean, isn’t it?” I nodded. “Well, if they’re so real, and Aslan’s not the real deal, _where’s God?_ Why didn’t he swoop in here straight out of the Bible and save all these kids? Wouldn’t be any room for pretenders if he just showed up!” He caught me out on that one. It _had_ been puzzling me- but then, we didn’t seem to get _every_ story, just the ones people were feeling the most affinity for. It did seem pretty statistically unlikely that not one of the million-or-so people hit by the whammy was heavily devout, though. So where were the gods and buddhas? As I pondered, Flagg took advantage. “You got no answer, cowboy, because he _did_ show up and _he’s right over there_.” This last, pointing at Aslan.

But this twigged another thought. I stepped forward again. “All of this from the defense, of course, begs the question- _Was this actually the rapture?_ Their entire argument so far rests on the idea that this is the biblical interpretation of the end time, and such an event calls for a savior. Well that seems pretty easy to refute. Do all of you love Jesus, in your hearts?” They all, at various speeds, nodded. “ _Then why are you still here?_ If the night of the Swap was actually the rapture, it should have taken you!” I gestured at the army gathered on the plains below. “Look at all of these followers, still here to form his army! Half the world disappeared, from every faith and walk of life- many of them had never even _heard_ of Aslan, and it sure didn’t seem like it had much to do with their virtue, because half of all our prisons and our politicians disappeared too! Meanwhile here you kids are, still on earth. Do you really think you were so much more sinful than _three billion other people_ , that you’d be left behind _?_ ” Tentative head shakes. “Then it can’t have been the Rapture! If it had been, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to bring Aslan here. Something else was happening that night, and we have to conclude that Aslan was taking-” Boden held up a hand, and I paused.

“I really need to pee!” With that, round one of court was adjourned.

\---

I stood with Sean at one end of the platform. Aslan and Randall Flagg were on the far side, and our juvenile jury had been sequestered in between until they waved us back over. It wasn’t hot, but Sean was sweating like it was a hundred and ten degrees out. I looked at him with a bit of concern, and threw some enchantments on him. He breathed in relief “Thank you. Am I just dying out there?” We’d agreed telepathically, earlier, that I would monitor them with _Detect Thoughts_ but not relay anything to him during the debate.

I shook my head. “You haven’t convinced any of them, I think you’re being too indirect. They’re just kids, Sean, they aren’t going to grasp high handed theology. You asked a lot of good questions but you need to get back out there and really lay out some evidence instead of just logical traps.” He nodded. I had an idea. “Listen, Detect Thoughts is really imprecise, but I’m picking up a lot from the Lion. Here’s what I think you need to do…”

\---

I returned to center stage when the kids waved us back over. They were looking at me expectantly, so I launched in before Flagg could unbalance me. “I’m going to change my approach. For our first witness, the prosecution would like to call Aslan to the stand.”

Flagg leapt in immediately. “Objection! Prosecution has already ceded the first argument- if Aslan is the lord then this farce of a trial is over, we don’t need to hear what he-”

Piper spoke up, surprising me. “Overruled.” She seemed to be getting into the courtroom drama at play here. “The prosecution did no such thing. Not all of us on this panel are ten years old, you know.” _Thank you_ , I mouthed silently. She glared at me. “He hasn’t told us anything about his plans, just that we’ll have thrones and a golden age. I want to know more.” We all paused and looked at the great golden cat, sitting to one side. He looked back, and finally nodded.

I said to him “Do you consent to allow the prosecution to scan your thoughts and project them via illusion, for all to see?” Flagg was about to speak up again, when Aslan simply nodded for a second time. _He really isn’t hiding what he is_. Haley cast the spells, and an image sprang into life in the air between the children and myself. At the moment it was simply a cat’s-eye-view of the current proceedings. There was an interesting infinite-mirror effect when he looked at the illusion itself. I tore my thoughts away from it and cleared my throat. First up, a clue handed to us by Skylar. “Ahem. Please detail to us what you were saying on the night of the Swap to your associate Mr. Flagg, here. In English, please.”

He stilled at that, but the image shimmered and rearranged itself until it showed his perspective of the plains of Tel-Megiddo. The rumble of distant guns, now all too familiar to me, sounded in the background. The Man In Black had just pulled up at the head of a convoy of special forces, and was approaching. “Welcome, Walter,” rumbled the voice. What followed was still in Hebrew, but apparently overlayed by an English translation. “Do the preparations go according to plan?”

The man in the cowboy hat and hoodie smiled evilly. “You don’t leave a lot of room to _work,_ friendo. Just six hours to bribe, threaten or outright replace the leaders of three separate nations? I ought to charge you double.” Behind him, the special forces unloaded the trucks, no logos or insignia visible.

“But I hear by the sounds of oncoming war that you have succeeded. The world has come for Israel, and the prophecies are fulfilled, one by one.”

The man in black spit on the ground, and looked sideways. “Yeah, well. For _certain_ interpretations. We got your bomb here, it’ll go off after we leave. That ought to kick the hornet’s nest something fierce.”

I stepped forward and ended the first playthrough. “There you have it. Aslan and Randall Flagg conspired, after his arrival, to set events _resembling_ the bullet-points version of the Rapture in motion.”

Randall stepped up and cut me off. “Yet they still happened! The ‘Good book’ was never specific as to _how_. It even indicates that ‘The Lion’ is gonna do some of that work himself, and now he has. What did this prove? Absolutely nothing. Aslan will go to any lengths, to bring about the golden age. You’d do the same if you thought it was righteous.”

I _wouldn’t,_ not _any_ lengths, but- “Then on to the second question for you, Aslan. Please show us the nature of your plans for this golden age.”

He closed his eyes, and the image before us shimmered again. This time it was a fantasy scene. A high angle shot of three children, Skylar being noticeably absent, seated on golden thrones in a high white tower. Spinning from them, the camera raced out the door of their throne room onto a balcony where Aslan was seated. Millions knelt before him, in unison, stretching as far as the eye could see.

“And after the kneeling and scraping is done?” I asked.

The view _blurred_ , recentered, a white and shining city being built from the ground up. Like a pyramid made out of the purest stone, it surrounded the grand tower. Outside the city grounds, fields of grain and corn waved on to the horizon. “A city to unite mankind,” intoned his voice, “to bring them together in one place, in glory and worship.”

I looked at it for a moment. It _was_ beautiful, a wonderful dream. But… “ _How many_?” I asked, quietly. “How many does it hold? How many survive?”

“A hundred million humans,” intoned the voice, emotionless, lost in distant thought on the glorious architecture the camera now swooped and panned around. “No more, no less.”

I nodded. “Three billion on Earth today, not counting the infomorph race. You’d kill or _allow to die_ two billion, nine hundred million of the remaining people on this planet, to see your vision through to reality.” The camera in the image zoomed, then, into the corn fields. At the base of the stalks was not _dirt_ , I realized. The foundation of the city was not white stone. It was _bone_. I looked at Haley- she shook her head at me, puzzled. She was not embellishing the image. This was _him_ , lost in his dreams of the future. The children were growing increasingly horrified. Even Randall was shocked into silence, for once. Aslan either didn't care about the impact he was having or simply did not understand human psychology well enough to _notice_.

Trying not to wake him from whatever this trance was, I prompted him softly. “The golden age of the Kings and Queens of Narnia only lasted 13 years. What happens when the age ends here?”

The vision changed, again. That same city, emptied, fallen to ruin. It zoomed out. The whole earth, barren- devoid of _all_ life, a cratered moonscape sailing dead through an infinite void. The voice continued, dreamlike. “I leave, of course, having gathered to me the faithful. The planet is immaterial, now.”

I made a “kill it” gesture to Haley and the vision cut off. I turned to the kids. “The evidence mounts. Not your savior. Not even a predator of men. He eats _worlds._ He will save one in thirty, for a decade, and then he will consume you all and leave your home a charred husk. _That_ is the salvation he offers you.”

Randall had rallied and now he stepped forward, all thunder and fury. “It is his _right!_ He owns this world and it is his to do with as he will. He promises life eternal for those who follow him- what do you care what happens to this place when you are all in paradise?” Silence reigned, for a time.

Then Piper spoke up. “ _I_ care. Even if it is his right, I don’t want to see this world ended. The people who can’t go to paradise deserve to live here.”

 _We’re tied for judges then, two to two._ I needed a final blow. “And for those who _don’t_ follow him, Mr. Flagg? Piper expressed concern for them, too. The prosecution calls a final witness. We call Skylar Kaur to testify. Could you come up here, please?” She hesitated, glanced at the other children. They nodded.

Flagg attempted to interject again. He seemed to be doing his best ‘Tweedy southern lawyer’ impression but I couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t _really_ trying to rebut, anymore. What was his game? “Now this is completely outrageous, you can’t ask the _judge_ to testify!” He walked over as if to physically stop her, but Haley _twisted_ space and he found himself pacing in the wrong direction. He glowered and lightning flashed from the full storm clouds. Tension was beginning to mount.

But Skylar took the center of the observation platform. “I can and I will. What do you want to know?”

I smiled at her. “I’m sorry for this, dear. Can you let us project your memories of the night Aslan came here? The time in the attic? The prosecution would like to show as its final evidence Aslan’s ‘Concern’ for those that do not immediately bend the knee.” She shuddered, but nodded. The great cat rumbled but did not object.

The light of Haley’s illusion flared, and we were in the attic of their home, amid a different thunderstorm. She stood to one side of Aslan, facing a brother I’d never met. He held a hunting rifle in shaking hands, pointing it at the great cat. “In the moment, all of this happened in a flash,” she said. “But later on, after I joined Miss Haley’s story, I started to… _remember_. More of what… he did.” Rain began to pelt us, standing on that mount above the plains, and the scene rolled on. The boy, nearly an adult, fired a shot. It sank into Aslan’s mane, doing nothing. The Lion stalked forward, slow as he pleased, and the boy racked the slide back and chambered another round. He raised the rifle to shoot again, and the lion simply swatted it out of his hands. The great claws tore horrible gashes across his chest and arm, and he fell back, crying out, hands over his face.

Aslan simply… _ate him,_ then. Slowly. Cruelly. A bite, and the right arm was gone at the wrist- he shrieked, and blood jetted. In Skylar’s mind the other children stood with her and stared into the distance, glassy eyed. The boy reached for them. The lion swatted him again, casually, knocking him far from aid. Another bite and he lost a good portion of his back. His cries were more feeble now, getting weaker as he lost blood. The lion did not finish him. It _waited,_ tail twitching. It was a _cat_ after all, playing with a mouse. The most sadistic possible game. When the end came, it came in blood, and sudden violence. A flicker of claw and his neck broke under that unstoppable paw. The Lion took time to clean himself then, in Skylar’s mind’s eye, and turned toward the children. He allowed them to recover some sense of consciousness, and he spoke to them. “Do not mourn…” The vision faded out.

“Monster.” I thought I’d spoken, at first. It was certainly the thought on my mind. But no- it was _Boden_. “He’s a monster. I _knew_ , but he wouldn’t _let_ me remember. What he did to Hunter…”

I finished. “He’ll do to everybody on earth, if you let him. This is your choice. The prosecution rests.”

Randall Flagg stood, silent and serious for the first time since I’d met him. Stared at the kids, for a long minute as the rain fell like tiny hammers and soaked us all. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and put on that old saucy grin. “Welp,” he said, winking at me. “Can’t win em all, I guess!” Whistling cheerfully, hands in pockets as if all was right with the world, he wandered away. As he passed me he _winked_. I really fucking hated when he did that.

Aslan stood, the picture of pride and dignity, at the edge of the observation platform. His glorious gold fur seemed untouched by the storm. “I do not apologize for my actions. Your people summoned a man eater, _needed_ a devourer of souls to worship. No lesser violence would do. I am what you have made of me, my nature is what it is. You have not called into question my _right_ , only my _actions,_ and they are not for _you_ to judge. Make your decision now, children, and remember the fate that awaits those who stand against me.”

He might as well have stayed silent. One by one, the children turned towards me. Piper looked at them, then summoned her courage. “If it’s not for us to judge, then who ever could? We find for the prosecution.” Lighting _crashed_ , and the world began to shake. But everyone on the platform stayed where they were. Even Randall, mid-stride. All but myself. And Aslan. It took me a second, then, to realize he was padding towards me. To notice the glassed-over look in the eyes of everyone else, even my wife.

“You have pulled a trick worthy of song and story, Son of Conor. I do not often _lose_ the argument over Law at the Table. But not all victories are clean. Strip me of my pawns as you might- I am still _in this world,_ and I will make an example of you. Even if I must be forsworn to do so.” What- no, this didn’t make sense, without his narrators he should have- I backed up, fell down on that rain-slick surface. Scrabbled backwards, toward the stairway. He marched on, inexorable. Inevitable. _They weren’t his narrators. They were never his narrators. Oh fuck._ “Run, if you like. I enjoy a chase, before the kill.” I couldn’t run. I couldn’t fight. I had my ridiculous enchanted pistols and I’d just seen what good _those_ would do. Still, I drew them, and held them out. One shot, and a roiling pinpoint of thunder and flame snapped out. Two, from a shaking hand. They passed into him without a trace. I screamed, wordlessly. He just kept coming.

I felt Sherriff doing the equivalent of bracing my shoulders, from the back of my mind. “ _ <Stand tall now, son. You did good work. We’ll die on our feet.>” _The death I feared. The divergence of our paths. This must be it. I’d known when the Dog first made me aware that I was telling Haley’s story that some day I’d have to stop, and what that might mean to be merely human in this world, to no longer have that fiat invulnerability. For her freedom, for the sake of the world… I accepted it, and willed the narrative to her if I died. _Better me in this place, than her._ The fear passed through me at last. I held my head high and the lion came on.

But as he passed the center platform there came a shout. “NO! NEVER AGAIN!” Skylar _ripped_ free of his mental binding, faster even than Haley could shake it off, and grabbed the dagger that always killed what it struck from the sheath strapped to her youngest brother’s waist. Before Aslan could whirl on her, she _plunged_ it into his side. He _roared_ , shatteringly loud, loud enough that everyone else was startled awake, and collapsed bonelessly in the center of the platform.

Despair gripped me. “Oh, Skylar, no.” Haley was whipping her head around frantically, trying to figure out what had happened. Flagg had disappeared altogether. The rain was torrential now.

Skylar looked at me, panting heavily, soaked through and covered to her elbows in his blood. “What? What did I do? He was going to kill you!”

I nodded. “Someone had to die here. He _wanted_ it to be him. Wanted you to do it, I think. It’s part of his story, he dies at the table and comes back, becoming master of Narnia. If all of you refused to participate in his story, it might have broken his power-” _I think-_ “he would have killed me, but Haley would have finished him.” I fell to my knees. “It was _worth it._ It would have been… worth it.” A golden light was emanating from the body of the slain lion. We had seconds, at most.

Haley said behind me, worriedly- “Sean? What-” I turned my head towards her, but it was Randall Flagg that I saw. He stood over me, red-dipped knife in his right hand. There was no smile on his face now. “Don’t worry, kids. I’ll finish where he started.” I had no time to react. He leaned in close, in a second timeless moment. “I threw that debate, you know.” he whispered conspiratorially. The knife _flashed_ and Haley _screamed_ and I felt my throat open. I fell to the ground.

She was shouting something, casting spells. An explosion, a flash of heat- I couldn’t hear anymore. The world was falling away in a pool of warm liquid, driving away the chill of the water. Sherriff spoke in my ear then, comforting. “ _ <A good ride, Sean. It was a good ride. Let her finish it.>” _I had enough strength, enough presence of mind, to pass my narrative control back to Haley.

And then the sky crashed, and my heart died, bleeding on a hill in a summer storm.


	21. Interlude - Second Coming

\---

Miss Delmutt And The Wiltshire Dog

Present

\---

Delmutt had grown fond of this world, in the week since coming here. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her home, but- everything here was so _private_ . At home everything that grew lived and died on information, in one way or another. Every time she went into the forests around her house, every footfall, every blow of the axe- it was recorded _somewhere_ , in some form, as a vibration or a change in a growth pattern or simply in the dumb light receptors that grew in some of the more exotic foliage. None of it _codified_ , no part used to stimulate a coherent thought, but still. The forest watched her, kept her. She felt like a great beast trundling through fog, sending out ripples and eddies no matter what she did.

Here the biology of earth’s flora converted light into _chemical_ energy, somehow- and yet, thought still existed! But it felt so much more polite, more demure. Like the world wasn’t watching over her shoulder at every waking moment. Wasn’t _built_ from observations of her. She liked that- like some great spring inside her was uncoiling here, for the first time in her life.

Or it would have been, except for the people. _Humans_ . Delmutt had always thought _her_ people were unreasonable and violent. And perhaps she was being unfair. The humans she’d met were being driven beyond all reason by gods and monsters come to torment and exploit them. Their whole civilization was collapsing. _But so is ours, and we don’t rise up against each other. We build and cooperate. We offer them no harm and still they threaten us- convenient patsies, for this disaster._ She would not condemn the entire race- Sean and Haley fought for her, after all- but she suspected that once all of this was over, the only safe place for infomorph-kind would be a land far away from humanity. Luckily, she had a plan- had hatched it as soon as she’d seen Haley’s new world.

She waved goodbye to the other three, as they pulled away in their pickup truck. Then she turned to the Dog, who considered her silently. They still weren’t friends- she still wasn’t even comfortable in his presence- but she was glad of the company right now, in the blasted field outside their recent bunker-home. “Well,” she said, “let’s try to do this the easy way.” Thinking hard at the ring on one of her forelimbs, she instructed it- _bring all of the infomorphs from the stadium to Haley’s dimension._ It had been pointed out that the lifespan of even the long lived infomorphs in that greatly-accelerated place would be measured in hours, from the outside. But for a species apart, in need of a home- a century or two of isolation in a planet to call their own, with wishes to serve their needs? It did not sound so terrible to her. They were not so bound to this time, this dimension, as all _that._ And perhaps they could meet this world on more even footing, should they decide to reconnect.

Within milliseconds, the answer came back from Haley’s simulacrum assigned as her telepathic relay. Delmutt turned to the Dog. “Didn’t work. None of the ‘morphs in the stadium can be targeted by her magic. The Efreet said it was like reality in that location had gone _soft._ ” She felt like these wish rings had been oversold a bit- sure, ultimate localized control over reality was _nice_ , but there were so many _restrictions_!

The Dog nodded, completely unsurprised. “Stories and stories again. Your people declined to participate in Her story, once before. Now they have gathered in such numbers that they’ve thinned the walls of the world, and Aslan is using that to his advantage. You will have to steal them out from under him.”

Delmutt hated the way he spoke in riddles and roundabout suggestions, like he always knew more than he was letting on but was too _superior_ to just tell anyone flat out. “So you’re saying we have to go there in person?”

The great blue canine paced away from her. “We were always going to have to. This story lacks a climax, otherwise.”

Alright, she’d had it. She stomped the three feet on her right side petulantly and stared after him. “ _You!_ Just _say what you know,_ damn it! I don’t _care_ how clever you think you’re being! Real lives are in danger here, and I can’t _trust_ you. If you know what’s going to happen, _tell me_ and let’s prepare for it!”

He turned back, and what she saw there broke her heart. _Pain, loss, madness and despair._ “The problem with being metafictional,” he said, “is that there are boundaries one _cannot_ cross. I am less constrained than any of you in some dimensions- yet more restricted than all, in others. I tell you what I can, when I can, and to know more might break your heart. Or worse yet, _the narrative._ ” He looked away. “Trust me when I say there are some things we do better not to see coming.” Far in the distance, storm clouds flashed and the guns of war rumbled.

\----

They _Gated_ into the vicinity of the parking lot at what had _been_ the stadium. At first Delmutt thought they’d made a mistake, because the building in front of her was _not_ the human colosseum they’d left, once upon a time. It _towered_ , rising story after story, miles into the air. It menaced with buttresses of inscribed stone. It stunned with parapets adorned with flags of every description. From every level, arches and windows and promenades and great balconies large enough to encompass the entire parking lot could be seen. At the base, a mile wide or more, great gates stood a hundred feet tall and _here_ , at last, she realized where she was. The human soldiers were still here, the same that had fired on her some days earlier. They surrounded the building in makeshift fortifications, but they also manned its walls. Combat had already begun- to the East, on the opposite side from Delmutt and the Dog, a great army was sieging the palace. Fire streaked back and forth and the sound of gunfire, even through the bulk of the stone, was deafening. “It _changed,_ ” she breathed.

“Cair Paravel,” said the Dog. “He summons his seat into this world. He knows it intimately, they will not be able to hold it. We need to find your friends.” With a gesture, she layered both of them in invisibility and undetectability spells. While the rest of the people in this place might not be susceptible to direct magics, Delmutt and the Dog _were_ , and nobody here should be able to see an object that scattered no light. With deft timing and one arm over his shoulders to avoid getting separated, she and the Dog were able to negotiate their way past the gates and inside. The fortress _shook_ , rang with collisions as the thunder of great guns beat on it from without. Past the first gate, they found themselves in a maze of marble and stained glass. Soldiers moved frantically up and down the halls, carrying orders and ammunition. A stretcher rushed past them, carrying a wounded man- burns covered half his body. “Follow him,” said the Dog. “He’ll take you to your people.” He ducked from under her.

“And you?” she asked, still suspicious. “Where will you go, in our time of need?”

“Where I’m needed most,” he said simply, and then he was gone. She hissed in frustration but she had no time to cry out, to search for invisible canines- whatever treachery he had planned, it would have to wait. _Or perhaps it’s time to trust him._ Not everyone was an enemy, after all. Either way the burned man was being carried around a corner and out of sight. She rushed to follow. Sure enough, within a few turns they had emerged in a vast inner courtyard- it had warped as well, but it still looked _suspiciously_ like the sports field she had last seen. Her people were gathered there. Their nests numbered in the thousands, breeding pits now bearing makeshift covers to shelter them from falling debris. The burned man was hustled into a medical tent to one side of the space, where casualties of the battle now raging outside were being held. The armed guard on the surviving infomorphs was _very_ light- presumably they had all been drawn away to the disaster outside. No more than a few dozen looked out over the whole field from raised positions. She supposed it wasn’t as if the infomorphs had very many ways to escape, as far as the humans knew.

“Perhaps it’s time to fix that,” she said to herself. She dropped her cloak of invisibility, appearing among the teeming masses, just one more face barely even drawing odd looks from those around her as they scurried. She grabbed a passerby. “Ayen, Larmutt, Dainbex! Any of the three! Have you seen them?” Within minutes she was within their presence- which was good, because the war without seemed to be intensifying. As she was hustled toward them, she realized that all of the infomorph activity she’d seen was to a purpose- they were _coordinating,_ streaming in and out of a makeshift encampment located next to one of the breeding camps. Inside she found Ayen, and Dainbex.

There was no time for greetings. “Larmutt is dead,” said Ayen, as soon as the three were alone together. “They found him with the phone this morning and executed him. They’ve killed _anyone_ who resists, or questions, or simply moves wrong. We don’t think it is the soldiers- they seem ashamed of their actions. Their commander though, the one they call ‘Colonel.’ He is _driven_ like a man possessed. He thinks we are demons of his religion. But he fights this so-called savior as well. Some of his own think he is mad. I’m not sure I disagree.” It gestured out of the tent where a line of infomorphs waited to distribute orders. “We are ready to move, but I hope you have more than simply yourself- we cannot hope to fight our way out of here, not with an army around us and another outside.”

She lowered her head briefly in mourning for a lost comrade. It’d been of the same clan, but she did not know it, not well. Still, a brave soul, taken too soon. Delmutt shook her head. “No need to fight. How many are working with you?”

Ayen clacked its mandibles in the morphish equivalent of a tight smile. Delmutt reflected, privately, on how long it felt like since she’d last talked to one of her own kind. “Oh. Everyone. Once they understood the stakes, they were all on board. They will do as we tell them, if you have a plan.”

Good, that was good. “Send out runners. Have them form a line and enter the tent. Keep it as disorderly as possible to avoid suspicion. I will open a portal here- get them through it, into the safe place.” So saying, she _willed_ and a ring of light manifested in the air before them. The others muttered and stepped back, as it resolved into a view of a beautiful, empty light forest. It stood upright in the tent, ten feet across, with no visible means of support.

“What is that place?” asked Dainbex.

“Just a vestibule to a better world,” said Delmutt offhandedly. “We should all be used to those by now. Get them through the door. When they’re all in, I’ll bring us into our new home as one.” _And avoid the time dilation issues from all of us streaming in one after another,_ she thought.

And they _were_ used to it, to their credit. Delmutt stood outside and watched as runners raced out, and the field began to empty steadily. Her heart was in her throat- the end _felt_ near- as one by one they entered that tent and did not re-emerge. The thunder and crash from outside sounded louder, and the stream of human casualties to one side of the tent did not abate. It was hard to think of them as _enemy_ just then, even knowing the murders they’d inflicted on her people, _would_ inflict again without hesitation. _Right now they die to give us time, even if they don’t know it._ “When did the stadium begin to change?” She asked Ayen, as they stood nearby and issued additional orders.

The infomorph cocked its head to the side, puzzled. “Change? What do you mean?” Delmutt didn’t know how to answer the question. _Did he alter it in your memories, as well_? She remembered well enough how it used to look, but after asking around, apparently nobody else who’d stayed here could recall. They did not even think to question why an impossible castle would exist here at the edge of a modern human city. _This must be what the Efreet meant by reality softening._ It wasn’t just the present he was rearranging, but the structure of the world itself. She began to understand why a victory for Aslan was such a terrifying prospect for Haley and the others. _It might be like none of us ever existed,_ she thought.

In their embattled state it took the humans longer than it should have to notice the prison break. But when the infomorph presence had thinned to just a few thousand, there were shouts from the galleries overlooking the great field. Delmutt _willed_ again, and great screens of force sprang up on all sides of the remaining refugees. Absent the need to maintain the illusion of disorder anymore, they picked up the pace. Among those last to leave were the breeding pits, eggs carefully packaged onto pallets and lifted by 4-morph teams who did not flinch, even as bullets began to crack into the blue screens and soldiers began to storm onto the field proper.

Delmutt stood in the center, amid the streaming morphs and flying bullets, and kept the screens up. She watched almost idly as the soldiers tested the barricades. She had no real way of knowing if they would hold, but if Haley’s magic could make a _world_ just this morning, surely it could stop a few bullets? There she stood still, head held high, when the Colonel finally made his presence known several minutes later. He walked straight out onto the field from the same entrance she had used, not even carrying a weapon. He had no fear at all- he simply walked towards her, until the screens stopped him closing any further. He tapped at them, looked at her. “So,” he said with open contempt. “Leaving after all? Our souls didn’t suit you, in the end?”

She looked at him with pity. He was collected, cool, and _utterly_ broken. Something behind his eyes was just… _missing_ , and she couldn’t tell if it had happened during the chaos of the last week… or long, _long_ before. “They never suited us. You’ll note that even as we leave, we do you no harm. Whatever you thought of us, you thought wrong.”

He waved it away. “Come off it. You’re saying that _thing_ out there isn’t harm? _You_ brought that. You were _spawned_ by this apocalypse. No amount of peaceful intent can wave away what you are. The ruin of half our species is tied up with your existence.”

She shook her head sadly. “You see enemies wherever you look. We were hunted by the creatures of Wonderland, we would be slaughtered just as readily by the Lion. Your own people offered us death at the end of their guns. So few humans have simply tried to help us, taken us for who we are, or even ignored us entirely- we would accept all three. I’ll be honest, Colonel, I don’t much feel like talking to you. We are leaving and you can’t stop us. I think, after all I’ve seen, that I should hate you. But I will simply wish you good luck, and goodbye.”

She turned then, and prepared to follow the last of her people as they streamed into the tent and gate. But he caught her with one final sentence. “I could, you know. Stop you.” She paused, turned her vessel’s head back to him. He was speaking in a dreamlike way, almost sing-song, staring off into nothing. Absolutely mad. “There’s a bomb. Right under this very field, just a few feet down, in the tunnels. It’ll take this whole castle and a good chunk of the city with it. The red-eyed man gave me the idea, in a dream. I could set it off any time, reduce you and everything else here to ash.” He came back from whatever fantasy he was in, looked at her, and she no longer felt any pity at what she saw in his eyes. “But I have to be sure. I have to be _sure._ ”

She turned and left him there, to whatever bleak victory he saw on the horizon. Her people would build, in another world, and they would come again.

\---

Sean And Haley

4 Years Ago

\---

“ _Sean!_ You can’t run from this!” I called from my office at the top of the stairs. He was storming down to the kitchen, probably to make angry waffles. The man made the best waffles I’d ever eaten but he could only do it when he was pissed off. It was uncanny. I didn’t _try_ to make him mad on purpose, but- “We have to talk about my Death Plan eventually!” -there were some things that were basically guaranteed to do it.

He shouted over his shoulder as he stormed down the stairs. “We _don’t_ and we’re not _going to!_ You’re _thirty-three_ and I’m not even going to _contemplate_ the possibility of your death for decades, at the least.”

I walked after him. “But what if something happens? You can’t account for everything, and I’ve been watching this mortician on youtube who talks about how important it is to have these plans and discuss them.”

He rounded the corner and stormed into the kitchen, where I head cabinets banging. _Yes, come to me, waffles._ “Then write your plan down and put it in a folder marked ‘Read in case of unfortunate brain hemorrhage.’ We’ll stick the will in there, and anything else that I never, ever want to think about.”

I came to the door and watched him work, but stayed out of his way. I knew this argument by heart, of course. He was _paralyzed_ by the concept of death. I’d always found that a bit frustrating- I, as an aspiring rationalist, rejected the _inevitability_ of death, and hoped that one day we as a species might overcome it. Sean agreed with me on that but he also _feared_ it, on a personal level. He wouldn’t discuss it, wouldn’t consider it. He’d bury it in waffles if he could. I limited these conversations to once or twice a year, out of fear for his blood pressure if I got him stress eating too often. “Okay, I’ll do that. If you’ll write one too.”

He shrugged angrily, _how do you even do that angrily,_ already mixing ingredients in one of our bigger bowls. “Why? We’re never having kids. We’re the end of the line. If I ever lose you I doubt I’m going to be sticking around long enough to-” he paused, realizing what he was saying. “I mean. Neither of us believes in an afterlife. But there are some things that I think oblivion would be preferable to,” he tried to justify.

I walked up and hugged him from behind. He continued stirring and I enjoyed feeling the movement of his back against me. “You lived twenty-five years without me, you could live the rest of your life if you had to. And I wouldn’t give up, if you went first. I’d want to know how you wanted to be mourned.” The stirring stopped. I couldn’t see his face, or his expression, but I wanted to continue. “Let me tell you a story.”

He put the bowl down, and I paced away from him. I did all my best long-winded ranting when I was pacing. “When I was young, I was still going to church with my dad- after mom stopped going, I think he went as a social thing. But the lesson that day was the second coming, how Jesus was going to come back someday and snatch us all up. And it _scared_ me, as a little kid- I didn’t _want_ some guy to show up and tell me it was time to die! I asked my dad, why is he going to come back? Why didn’t he set it all the way he wanted the first time?” I’d already made two loops around that tiny kitchen- we hadn’t moved to the bigger place, back then- and Sean finally came over and stilled my pacing, taking me by the arms.

I looked up at him. “It was the first time Dad ever contradicted the church to me. He said ‘I don’t think he’s coming back,’ and I asked him why not. He said, ‘I think it’s an excuse. It’s a thing we tell ourselves, so we don’t have to think about what we’d do if we only got the one visit. We’re _pretty sure_ he already came and died to tell us how to live right, but we didn’t pay enough attention. So we say ‘It’s okay, he’ll be back,’ like that would fix anything. He could come back a hundred times, and it wouldn’t change us because there’d always be one more. One and done, honey. Live a good life like _this_ , and love the people around you like you get one shot at it. Do it because it should be done.”

Sean stared at me as I teared up. He got that sheepish grin on his face, the one where he wasn’t quite following but was embarrassed about it. “And the relevance to your death plan is…?”

I sighed and leaned into him. “If our gods only get one, why should we get more? We can’t put death off, can’t hide from it, can’t plan to give up if it doesn’t shake out the way we want. I’d like to live forever with you. We’ll call that Plan A. But even if you weren’t coming back- I’d go on, because I have to pre-commit to that if I want to live _now._ Plan B is me committing to doing it right the first time.”

He held me tight so I couldn’t see the inevitable smirk creeping onto his face. “Live like you were dying?”

I smacked him on the chest. “ _Tim Mcgraw? Really?_ You’re not sidetracking me so easily. Death Plan or waffles, mister, get cracking.” He laughed and turned back to the mixing bowl. I resumed my pacing, already anticipating the sweet scent of the batter meeting the iron.

\---

Charles Kaur

Present

\---

It had been at least two days since Charles Kaur had last slept for more than an hour at a stretch, a fact which was not helping his splitting headache. But he couldn’t risk another encounter in his dreams. Every _thump_ of artillery and mortar seemed to _throb_ in his head, making the world pulse and twitch in ways that had stopped feeling _aggravating_ a while ago, and simply begun to feel like _reality_. The whole structure of the castle seemed alive around him. Like the guts of a great beast slowly waking up, with him on the inside. _Voluntarily marching to our deaths in its bowels_ , he thought, and chuckled. The Captain, who’d run to his side as he stood on the now-empty field in the courtyard of the tower, looked at him worriedly. “Sir?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing, Captain. Just… coping, with all of this.” _I declared war on my own god_. _Does it really matter what happens, after that?_

The Captain’s face expressed all the doubt that he was as-yet unwilling to voice. “Sir this position is compromised. They have paths into this structure that we can’t detect. I’m losing contact left and right, people getting cut off in the middle of our defenses. We have assistance from civilians but… we need to fall back.”

The Colonel was only half listening, but he caught this last and immediately dismissed it out of hand. “No, no. We hold here. He wants to be _here_. Nothing else matters.”

The Captain stepped away from him and, almost casually, half-turned away. Charles was no fool. He could see the man’s hand going for the pistol he kept on his hip. “Sir, you are asking all of us to commit _suicide_ against an impossible monster and an army of fanatics and you still haven’t explained why. A week ago this city hadn’t seen a war in a century and a half. Religious arguments aren’t going to cut it. We penned up the bugs, we fought on the highway. My men have died to carry out your orders and I am starting to suspect your _judgement_ is _extremely compromised._ ” Charles was quietly impressed- he’d begun to think that Captain Kitchener didn’t have it in him, to question the chain of command. _How unfortunate that it’s come so late._

Charles turned from the captain. “The chairs, Roy.” He gestured upward. “In the highest room of this tower. Have you seen them?” Roy nodded, warily. Charles couldn’t quite remember when this tower had been built, or _why_. He knew they had to defend it. He had an _enemy_ and a _mission_ and his life made no sense even so. _Maybe He just needed someone to fight against, in the end. Maybe I was convenient to him, and He’ll forgive me._ But another part of him was still in rebellion. “He needs the chairs. He wants to put my _kids_ on them. Needs to, to win. But I’ll be here, and I’ll blow them out from under him. I’ll bring the whole thing down before I let him have it.”

Captain Kitchener considered, for a moment. “And your kids, sir?”

Charles giggled madly. “We don’t negotiate with hostage-takers, Captain. They were dead the moment he got his paws on them.”

Roy Kitchener came to a decision. A man who was capable of bombing his own children to win an inexplicable war… Who could trust that judgement? He pulled his pistol and levelled it at Charles. “Colonel Kaur, I am relieving you of command.” With his free hand he pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “Haley, there’s a nuclear device in the service tunnels. You were right, the Colonel is unfit.”

Charles turned to him with a manic grin. “Will you kill me now, Captain? I’m not even sure where I’ll go, when this is over. God didn’t ask even Isaac to sacrifice _all_ of his children, how could I _not_ have opposed him? How could any righteous man not have?”

“A righteous man understands _obedience_ , Charles Kaur,” came the rumbled words. A flare like the rising of a new day’s sun came from the field, and stepping from it to stand before them was the great Lion in all his terrible glory. He was twice the size of a man. He was a hundred feet tall. He was so bright and right and _good_ that Charles fell to his knees and wept- even now he could not repent. Blood caked his side but he was whole. Around him armed men bearing his heraldry began to sweep out, securing the perimeter, the tent with the hospital unit. Shots rang out as the last of his soldiers died or were driven off, but still he lived. The Lion spoke to him directly for the second time. “I can understand your hesitation. Your children are safe. They move to the top of the tower.” An image formed, in Charles’ mind. A man in a black hoodie and cowboy boots was dragging a small procession of armed men and children up one of the many staircases in the tower. The children were struggling, unable to escape the grasp of the men who carried them, but they were _alive_.

Roy was shouting into his phone now but Charles didn’t hear his words. He wept openly. He’d never been an emotive father, but to see them one last time… and to know there was no hope, even now. How could he _not_ weep? His children. He had never been a good father, or even a _present_ father. But they were _his_ , and he was _theirs_ , and he felt a bond that ran deeper even than his love for the faith in which he was raised. Even as he watched them, his grip tightened on the trigger he kept in his pocket. Alive was not the same as _free_ , and they would never be free while the Lion existed. At the very least, they wouldn’t feel it. It would be quick. “For Hunter,” he muttered.

But his hand was stayed, by a final flash of light- this time _golden_ instead of radiant, like the setting sun. The walls of the tower around them were bathed in a warm yellow glow as a portal opened across the field from Aslan and the men on the grass levelled their weapons.

They didn’t even slow me down.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haley's Juvenile Character Sheet, Chapters 18-???  
> https://bit.ly/2JdwPGb

One by one, the children turned towards Sean, standing on that giant mound of rubble as the storm clouds began to break. Piper, the oldest girl, glanced at all of them and then said solemnly: “We find for the prosecution.” And then the world _jumped._ It felt like I’d lost time- Aslan was suddenly thirty feet forward of where he’d been, dead on his side in the middle of the platform. Skylar was standing over him, a bloodied knife falling from her hand. Sean had his pistol out and the children were standing still, shocked. “Oh, Skylar, no.” he said, despairingly.

An _Intelligence_ score of 31 and _Perception_ in the mid-20’s let me catch up quicker than I otherwise would have, even as I stammered “Sean, wha-” _what happened? Oh, I see. Aslan was doing that same thing he did to their brother and from our perspective it looks like a time skip. It couldn’t have lasted long, it would wear off on me. But that means he was about to eat someone-_ **_SEAN._** I whipped my head around too late, ignoring even the flare of white radiance from the no-doubt resurrecting body of Aslan. Randall Flagg was already leaning over Sean, that strange blood-soaked knife in hand. It flashed once, across Sean’s throat. I screamed.

Aslan wasn’t the only one with powers. Time stopped, for me. Quite literally. The entire scene froze, even the pounding rain. A _Time Stop_ spell that I had placed on myself with a _Contingency_ , as part of my buff sequence. I’d set it to activate if anyone in my group was in a life threatening situation. With the equivalent of three or four “Rounds” of Pathfinder time to act, I immediately dropped into the time-shifted parallel dimension where one round was equivalent to a full year. I had time to think, here. Time to work the problem. I began summoning efreets.

I hit Sean with every healing and preserving magic I could. Nothing. I tried to pull his soul out and seal it in a jar. Nothing. I tried to summon a clone body for him to swap into if he died- _why hadn’t I done that before-_ Nothing. Everything conflicted with the magic of the knife. It resisted any attempt to save him. Skylar had told us, briefly, what Aslan had promised them- that it would kill anything it was used on- and that appeared to be an absolute. On the one hand it made sense- Aslan intended it to be used on himself, it had to be beyond lethal. On the other hand- well, there was no other hand, but this was so _unfair_. If it was a compulsion or a poison it probably wouldn’t have worked because Sean’s story ran counter to Aslan’s. But it seemed to have just blasted his soul right out of his body. Some horrible part of me was wondering about the implications of that for offensive Pathfinder magic even as I panicked. Even in the time stop, viewed from my gateway in the other dimension, I could see Sean’s body flaking and beginning to turn to black ash, the way Randall’s kill at our bunker had done. As soon as time resumed there wouldn’t even be a body. Stolen away by that magic.

 _The knife._ Maybe I could destroy it? I tried to rip it out of Flagg’s hands but it was frozen in the moment, and the rules of _Time stop_ prevented direct magical effects. “You cannot move or harm any items in another creature’s possession,” it said. It didn’t say anything about non-destructive heating. In my alternate world, I wished together a bomb-pumped x-ray laser and used my matter/antimatter pocket-dimension as a source. There might be dilation issues if I tried to fire it across the time-shifted barrier of the dimensional gates, so I thrust the whole array through a gate into real space and fired at the knife. Substantially more energy than a conventional nuke plant was capable of producing in a day was dumped into that little metal blade within microseconds, but it didn’t melt or even evaporate. In some ways it was invulnerable, but not completely immune to physics. So it _heated up_ , glowing white-hot and then blinding, radiating _hard_ across the spectrum in a way that was going to be a real problem for anyone on that platform without access to regeneration in the next couple of hours. It simply evaporated Randall Flagg’s hand, even at the incredible time dilation we were operating at, and would have gone on to slag the rest of the platform as well had I not teleported it into the sun the second its protection from my magic no longer applied to it.

I paused then, to consider, and made my first mistake. I thought I had time, in my pocket world. Years before Sean’s body even began to collapse, back in the real. But the second I took my eyes off of that gate, the _instant_ I let that asshole out of my sight, I heard him. A throat clearing from behind me. I whirled around and there he was, the Man in Black in the flesh. Not even worse for wear from his encounter with the laser- well, minus a hand, but he took it in stride. “Told you I’d still be walkin’ when your bones turned to dust. Well, _his_ bones, I guess. I keep what I kill, no use fighting it.”

I didn’t bother with a response, hitting him with a line of fire breath as I telepathically commanded every simulacrum in my planet-sized dimension to either dogpile him or teleport in for a similar attack. The breath didn’t even phase him. He grinned at me, the nasty kind, the kind of smile from a person who knew he’d just cut you deep and there was _nothing_ you could do about it. ‘Now you don’t think I’d be dumb enough to come here in _person_ , do you? This is just a little spell like you’re so fond of, to give you your marching orders. I know how much you hate me talkin, darlin, so I’ll be brief. I imagine you’ve got a lot on your plate now that you’re newly single and all.”

I could feel nothing but panic and cold rage. I tamped it down and contacted the simulacra. He must have slipped the _Time Stop_ much earlier than expected- made sense, considering. _Get me his position in the real world. Scry every fucking square inch of it if you have to_. In the meantime I’d talk. “You know I’m not going to do anything that helps you.” He _cackled_ and the sound sent chills down my spine. It was like someone who had never known humor except by description alone. I knew where I’d heard that eerie laughter before. _The Coordinator. It sounds just like the Coordinator._ That phone call in the department store. Had it been him? _Or his master? What is his plan, here?_

He was still slapping his knee. “Oh honey, you haven’t done anything _but_ help me! That’s what makes my job so fun, you know. Listen, this is a gas, but I’ve got places to go, corpses to make. Here’s your helpful hint for the day- Big Kitty’s headed for the tower now that you’ve powered him up and you have, oh, I’d say five minutes real time to stop him. Chop chop!”

“Wait.” I stopped him, before he could turn through the air and vanish in front of me. He looked back, expectantly. Hoping to see tears. I don’t think he liked what he saw, instead. “I’ve got a message for you. I have a feeling you think you’ve won. You’re the chess master, and we’re all moving into the end game on your board. I’ve read all of that before. But I know you, Man In Black. I know what you were made for. You aren’t the devil. You aren’t even the _villain_ today. Your job in a story is to put everyone in their right places, and then _die_.” He frowned, and I knew I’d struck a nerve. I turned away, dismissing him with contempt. “You’re _public transport_ and I’m done with this ride.” I called off the search for him. _I know where he’ll be_. Sent a telepathic message to the Dog, instead.

The second I was sure he was gone, I collapsed. Everything I’d said to Sean, everything he’d said to _me_ , in the last few days. It all came rushing back. _He knew_. He _knew_ one of us was likely to die here, to a reversal of Aslan’s story if nothing else, and he knew that as long as he was still the narrator he could make it himself. “You idiot,” I cried. Even as I said it I knew I didn’t mean it, but “You stupid selfish _bastard,_ ” maybe it helped just a little bit. I thought back to how he’d been, in our time in this pocket world. _He’d already made up his mind to take the hit if one of us had to. He didn’t share it with me because he knew I’d stop him. Knew I had to be the one to stay on the board._ And then the Lion… _he stood there and faced Aslan_ , knowing _none of us could help._ To do all that and _live_ , only to die miserably to that _ratfucker_ seconds later _._ So suddenly. So _completely. Despite every precaution and protection. How can it end like this?_

I don’t know how long I lay there, overcome by the whole range of human emotion. Pride and awe and love and black, black despair. It might have been days. I couldn’t process. There was no rush. Five minutes out there was fifty years in here. But eventually that sense of urgency arose again, all the same. I clung to it, wouldn’t look away from it. I couldn’t take time to think, right now, or I might not get up again. It flashed through me like lightning. He was _dead_. Despite all my power, all the protections, killed by a knock-off Devil conjured up by a hack from Maine. I choked back a sob. _Focus, Haley_. I stuffed it all down deep until only the mission remained. I glanced at the portal. Sure enough, the top of that great mound out in the real world was empty, devoid of kids and Lion and Flagg long before the _Time Stop_ should have expired. _Guess that enchantment didn’t apply to them either._

I spent some minutes preparing. It was clear by now that having every spell in Pathfinder didn’t make us invulnerable or even close to it- there were trumps and trumps to those trumps, and it would take a savvy manipulator of stories to win this battle. Still I refreshed every buff I could. Prepared an arsenal of kinetic impactors, calculated to deliver maximum force without causing nuclear events when released in-atmosphere. Built several more iterations of the bomb-pumped laser. Compressed enough energy into one demiplane that the interior collapsed into a black hole. That was when I checked myself. _You’re building weapons to end_ worlds, _in here. None of this applies._ If this was a story, the rules wouldn’t allow it. I _couldn’t_ expect to simply show up and erase my final enemy from the face of the earth. I made other plans, instead. I didn’t think about Sean. Finally I was ready. My first task was to find the Captain I’d met before.

\---

As it turned out, he was having problems of his own. Some time during our talks at the makeshift Stone Table, Aslan had ordered the remainder of his forces to launch an assault on the stadium. And it wasn’t a stadium anymore, I noticed with a start as I exited my teleport in the air above it- it was a _fortress_ , a vast column of stone flanked on every side by defense positions. _So that’s what he meant by tower._ The soldiers who’d come to Midland City were dug in up and down the structure, but it wasn’t doing them much good. The noise I gated into was overwhelming. An attack helicopter of some sort had targeted Captain Kitchener’s section of the wall, and his men were hunkered behind parapets all along it, dead or dying. The stone might as well have been soft cheese to the autocannon on that thing. It might have been a threat to me, even now, had I let it live.

I blinked and a kinetic impactor, a tungsten brick traveling at around mach 20, exited a gate underneath the vehicle. It simply _ceased to be,_ vomiting upwards and backwards in a trail of metal and fire. The special forces scaling the wall I erased with precise releases of energy, barely even scarring the battlement. The ones I could see inside the walls, coming up via secret passage, I dealt with via similar means. I preferred non-lethality where possible, but mind-affecting spells would fade too quickly and my patience for these men was at an all time low. Still, I tried to get ahold of myself as I landed. I touched down in front of Captain Kitchener and his men. Several of them shot me. I paid them no mind. I _was_ a sixteen foot tall, thirty-foot long armored monster and they’d had a rough day. Conventional arms were of very little threat to me, anyway. “Captain Kitchener.”

He waved his arm at the rest of them. I had to give him credit, he was cool under pressure. “Cease fire, goddamnit! Ceasefire. Mrs… McCarthy, wasn’t it? You’re bigger than the last time I saw you.” His pupils were enormously dilated- so maybe less cool and more combat shock, I assessed. I settled onto my belly on the battlements, both to get closer to him and to avoid giving any easy targets to the oncoming forces of Aslan’s army. I threw up a couple force walls anyway, just to be safe. _No more risks._

“Yes, magic will do that. Captain, I need your help. And _you_ need _my_ help. Your men need to get out of here. This fight isn’t about them, and they can’t win it. I can throw a gate down, and get all of you out, but I need you to coordinate the evac. I also need to know if there’s a room in this tower with four thrones.”

He shook his head, trying to come to terms with the new reality. “I… none of this makes _sense_. Can you tell me what’s going on?” I sighed, and pulled him into the pocket dimension. Better to have this conversation here, where we wouldn’t be wasting time and lives. He stared around, awestruck, and stumbled backwards a few steps. I kept forgetting the effect the vast planet-sized Dyson Sphere had on newcomers. “Oh what the _fuck._ ” I read him in on what was going on, and gave him a chance to calm down. Eventually we had an understanding. He sat on the grass of the park, rifle in his lap, staring up at the vast city-forest curving away in every direction. “So, I knew magic was real, but this… this scale. You’re saying this Lion has more power than _this?_ ”

I nodded. “As I am discovering, yes. And he has your commander’s children, is using them as pawns. He’s not a good guy, and he can’t be allowed to win here, but… he and I have been manipulated. Set on some kind of collision course. I’m not sure why, yet, but I expect that the man manipulating us doesn’t want either of us to win. None of that is material to you. You need to get your people out of the way.”

He considered. “The bugs? What about them?” He gave me a hard look. “You’re already evacuating them aren’t you.” I nodded, and he sighed. “Waste of god damn time and lives, same as every other deployment. Look, set up your doorway on the far side of the stadium from the battle and I’ll spread the word around. But I need to talk to the Colonel, first. He’s probably down in the courtyard. Can you standby until I give the word? Maybe cover the tower, shield our people and take some of the heat off? I saw what you did to that Apache earlier.”

I smiled and I don’t think it looked particularly human from the way he shuddered. “Captain, it would be my _pleasure_.”

\---

The battle outside was short-lived after I involved myself. I ordered up a phone for Roy and gave my end to a simulacrum to monitor. Then I summoned about ten thousand more of my slightly-downscaled clone sisters, equipped them all with wands of _Summon Monster IV_ and _Detonate,_ and simply rolled over Aslan’s army like a tide. A half-sized copy of a dragon was still a dragon, after all, and an army of them was harder than anything the Lion could field. I couldn’t hit his men with enchantments and expect them to stick for long _,_ but conjuration was fair game, I figured. Anyone on foot was caught by dozens of earth elementals sprouting from the ground in every direction with orders to disarm and subdue. Anything more hardened than a light truck was swarmed and, if that failed, subjected to hundreds of grenade-like explosions. I didn’t _want_ to kill, and I avoided it in all but a few cases, but non-lethal means only went so far when everyone was armed. Clusters of dragons descended on anything that stood up to my aerial barrage, tearing apart armor, discarding occupants and melting interiors with abandon. Some of my copies were killed by the scattered return fire, but they simply dissolved into ash and snow as the bullets tore them apart. I lost nothing. I had nothing left _to_ lose. I felt desolate. At least, I consoled myself, I could make sure he regretted ever coming here.

As I watched the pummeling of Aslan’s army, and the withdrawal of the army units from the battlements, the call came from Roy. “Haley, there’s a nuclear device in the service tunnels. You were right, the Colonel is unfit.” I began spinning up a _Dimension Door_ to the interior, even as I heard Aslan arrive and Roy began screaming “ _Now,_ Haley, _get down here NOW.”_ I stepped through from the last dying rays of sunlight into a dim and shadowy vaulted interior, covering the courtyard that had been at one point a stadium’s field. Delmutt had done her job, I saw- the infomorphs were safely evacuated. Aslan and a platoon of armed men stood on one side of the field, opposite the Colonel. More of his men had apparently just finished executing the wounded in the field hospital. _Why did he even bother sending men against the outside? As a floor show? Is he just stepping in time with some narrative beat?_ In the old man’s hand was a detonator, millimeters from activation. Without my lifting a finger Aslan’s men all received human-scale kinetic impactors from my gates, simply _puffing_ away into red mist with only muffled _thwacks_. I motioned Roy out of the room and he took the hint, exiting at a dead sprint, phone still to his ear.

Just the three of us now. Aslan’s brow twitched, and he turned to me. He was _bigger_ now. His death and resurrection had empowered him. He swelled with power- it was like the room was illuminated by his presence. “So, Dragon. It will be you and me after all.”

I wasn’t in the mood for yet another standoff. “You know we’ve been played, this whole time. Flagg wants us to fight, and kill each other. The Colonel’s bomb is his trump in case one of us survives.”

The Lion nodded. “So it has always been, between him and I. But evil will shall evil mar, as the saying goes.” He turned toward the Colonel, no doubt intent on pulling the same stalk-and-kill maneuver that had left my husband vulnerable, minutes ago. I _felt_ the air begin to thicken, this time, but I shook it off. _Won’t work on me twice._

I pulled him up short. “Try it and I set the bomb off myself.”

He and the Colonel looked at me incredulously. Aslan spoke again, “You’d hold us all hostage, then? Even the children? Even knowing, as you do, that I’d likely survive?”

I had to sell this. Had to buy time. I tapped into that place I’d been ignoring, and stared straight into his eyes. Sent every ounce of pain and madness and rage straight at him. He actually recoiled, a step. “Go after him and die. You broke rule three, asshole. You _killed my husband._ The only reason this planet _exists_ right now is because I’d rather beat you _utterly_ , than take a pyrrhic victory and start from scratch. I will kill as many people as I have to, as long as you are one of them.” Untrue, but he didn’t need to know that. He needed to believe he was dealing with a mad woman, if I had any hope of keeping the Colonel alive.

The Colonel laughed. “Well, I don’t know who you are but I like your style. I suppose we have a Mexican standoff. Terms, Lord? I believe I’d like my children back, if that’s on the table.”

The Lion rumbled. “It is not. I offer no terms. They will be seated, and then you will die. Your soul will travel beyond my sight and you will face oblivion eternal.” The Colonel shuddered at that, but didn’t budge. My eyes narrowed- Aslan was waiting out the clock, counting on Flagg to continue the dance.

They looked at me. I stood up and paced in a small circle, swiveling my neck so that my eyes never left Aslan. “I want _you_ off my world. Everything else is negotiable. Colonel, we can make common cause here. If you’ll hold your bomb, I promise you’ll see him gone and your kids alive, before this is through.”

The Colonel considered _._ “Yesterday, I thought they were dead. Today, I knew they were alive but in the jaws of a monster I couldn’t hope to fight. Now you’re offering me _hope_ and I don’t know how to react. I’m strung out, and tired, and I think I’ve been high on despair for a long time now, fighting a losing battle from the moment the Rapture happened. _He_ looks like the savior here, but you’re the one offering me salvation,” he mused. I could sympathize with him, if he wasn’t a half-inch from annihilating his own men, his kids, and the city he’d sworn to protect.

We waited, the three of us. Aslan, standing in his battle-plate, feeling no need to make a move yet. Me, risking everything like a fool to try and save one more life and buy more time for my allies. The Colonel, torn between hope of a path to victory and one last stab at his enemy. For a moment the world hung in the balance. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. No deals. I have one bullet, and one enemy. We all go together.” I closed my eyes and heard Sean’s voice in my mind. _You can’t save everyone, Haley._

Aslan stood angrily, looking at me. “And what guarantees were you equipped to make? You come here, to the center of my power, at the height of my narrative, and negotiate against _me?_ ” He was genuinely indignant. “Who are you, woman, without that ring on your finger?” I felt a tingle, looked down. My smallest claw was suddenly visible again, through the ring-gate. _Oh no._ He’d done something to it. I checked- yep, cut off from the wish engine. He snorted, contemptuously. “Little more than human.”

Oh, that tore it. I needed more _time_ but I just had to hope, without my cell phone connection, that Captain Roy had carried out my orders. I supposed it was time to grandstand, in the best tribute to my husband I could manage. I stood to my fullest height and _willed_ my presence outward, captivating them both. “Who am I? Other than a twenty ton fire-breathing lizard with an arsenal of half the spells in a _game about combat_ on my back? I’ll tell you, you jumped-up excuse for a fucking _throw rug._ Not _once_ have you used my name. Dragon, Whore of Babylon, ‘Adversary.’ You called my husband by name _,_ but you have a _problem_ looking women in the eye, don’t you, _Aslan._ ” I stopped pacing, and stepped forward, towards him. The Colonel, seeing our stalemate broken, mashed his thumb on the detonator- and nothing happened. _Roy came through, then_. Somewhere down below he had removed the keys, or ripped out the transmitter, or done _something_ to keep that bomb from blowing. One threat defused. Now it was my turn.

I stalked forward until I was eye to eye, staring Aslan down. Setting a stage. “Who am I?! A hero to a broken world. A wife to a murdered husband. A narrator who knows her story’s stronger than _yours._ The only person who came to this standoff with _friends_.” He twitched, at that, and I knew I had him. We were face to face, inches apart. “My name is _Haley,_ you son of a bitch. You’re going to die choking on it.” He blinked. _He blinked_. And violence happened.

\---

Elsewhere

\---

The entire tower _kicked_ like the belly of an expectant mother. Randall Flagg paused for a moment in his ascent up the primary stairs. His arm ached where that near-nuclear dagger had burned a hand clean off- he had not had time to take care of it. The soldiers hauling the irate and struggling children patiently paused behind him. When no fireball followed the bucking of the stone, he giggled madly and did a little jig on the landing. “Guess they’re really hitting it off, down there! Hurry hurry kids, got to get this show on the road!”

Skylar shook her head free of the guards long enough to bite out, “What do you even _care_ , you- you _jerk_? You want them to kill each other, why does it matter if we sit on some stupid chairs?”

Randall gestured, and the column resumed. The stairs were _endless_ \- well, not quite, but they felt that way. There were no elevators in this place, and the climb was exhausting. “Stories and stories again, kiddo! This tower could be a _lot_ of things, from the right perspective. Aslan’s not the only one with an interest in architecture! But if you don’t reach the top then it doesn’t matter, to me, if it blows or not. It also won’t matter if you take a long tumble down all these cold, hard steps, so _get moving_.” The men manhandling the kids shoved them all forward, and at long last they rounded the final landing and came to the doors of the throne room. With his good hand Randall fingered the ring in his pocket- the _gate_ he’d stolen off of a dead man, the back door he’d used to taunt a woman into murderous rage not so long ago. It felt unusually heavy.

The air felt like they were miles up, or more, and the doors were certainly heavenly in their ornamentation. Fifteen feet tall, covered with gilt and scrollwork, they stood open and inviting, giving a glimpse into the room beyond. A vaulted chamber occupied this whole floor of the tower, flanked with arched galleries and balconies such that it was practically open to the air outside. They could smell the fire and debris of the war, far below, though the _crack-crack_ of gunfire no longer reached them up here. In the room’s center, lit from above by a massive stained-glass dome, stood a raised dais and four stone thrones. Unlike everything else in the room they were simple, undecorated, almost ominous. “Unclaimed,” said Randall, with approval. He ushered the children in.

Before they could be forced into sitting, a voice rang out. It came from everywhere in the room, and nowhere. Skylar jumped and shouted in joy- she recognized it. The Wiltshire Dog. “Unclaimed, but not undefended. You seek the _Beam_ , Man In Black. You should not have mentioned _towers_ when you taunted your victim. She stole a march on you, you’ll find nothing here.” The tower shook again with the impacts of a titanic struggle unfolding far below.

Flagg muttered to himself, “So she _did_ have a plan. Dangerous, that one. Learning the ropes.”

Raising his voice, he called back to the disembodied presence, “Shows what you know, Krypto! The world _thins_ , up here. Just ‘cuz Aslan says it’s a tower don’t mean it’s _his_ tower unless he wins! And if it’s mine…”

The Dog finished his thought. “It will carry the beam, and you will destroy it, as you always do.”

Flagg nodded. “That’s the dance, partner. I’ll keep stepping it until it’s done. Now, put up or shut up. You’ve got nothing to threaten me with.” He gestured again and the soldiers began hauling the children forward. They shouted in anger and tried to struggle free but it was no use.

“Nothing?” asked the Dog’s voice, growing in size and strength but still seeming to come from every direction. “What are the Cheshires, if not threshold guardians? And what is a threshold if not the door between one place…” the arched galleries began to _warp_ , multiplying out in a dizzying mirrored array into infinity, “...and another?” The dais was impossibly far away now, and the room was fast-filling with a mist that blocked all sight. “You said it yourself, Man In Black. The world is _thin_ , here. So thin you could step right through.”

The children fell to their knees, suddenly devoid of their captors, all lost in the mist. “Stay where you are!” yelled Skylar, “Don’t go wandering or you might fall off a balcony!”

Flagg, for his part, didn’t listen. He stumbled forward, waving the mist out of the way. “God damn dog, I’m gonna make a new pair of _boots_ out of you,” he snarled, to no avail. He found himself in front of a door and, lacking any alternative, went through it.

He stood on a ridgeline, staring down across a vast prairie of unfamiliar grasses. A storm was rolling in across the horizon. He recognized none of it, and stood for a minute, puzzled by the scene. Then a voice came from behind him. _That,_ he recognized all too well from a recent debate. “Hello, Randall.” It took on a conspiratorial tone. “I threw that stabbing, you know.”


	23. Chapter 23

\----

Sean, Location Unknown

Moments Ago

\----

For a second time I flew through that infinite crystalline space full of dancing points of light, but this time I was not merely an observer. I _was_ one of the sparks, splitting apart from my partner in that twinned spiral. I cried out with a mouth I no longer possessed, reached back with hands that did not respond, but I continued to move along my path. I exited that solid sphere and I could only watch in horror as my partner, whose name I could not remember, could not even remember I’d _forgotten_ , became entangled in a fierce and rolling battle with others just waiting to pounce. A battle I could not participate in.

A voice spoke, in my head. “Conflict.” I turned- other sparks, and _not_ sparks, shapes I no longer had the senses to comprehend, were gathered in a great audience. The drama played out before them like a stage- and I sat beside it, suddenly feeling like I was on trial. “A conflict has occurred. Judgement is sought.” The voice was light, feminine. “Two sources of resurrection. Both are blocked.”

Another spark lit up. Masculine, booming. “One resurrection has already been claimed- a questionable decision. The Deep Magic does not apply unless the Lion claims this narrative retrocausally, and even if it did, that death was no sacrifice for another. The other resurrection is much weaker- _mechanical,_ not narrative. It does not overrule the knife’s claim to absolute death.”

I couldn’t speak but I _willed_. _Send me back. I need to go back._ The feminine spark silenced me. “Interference in deliberations from _participants_ will not be tolerated.” Its attention was hot, searing, oppressive. I would have breathed in relief when it turned away, had I had the lungs to do so. “The source is weak. But the source’s claimant may yet narrate this world in its entirety.”

A third light spoke and this one sounded like nails on a chalkboard, like the ending of the world. It _hurt my soul_ just to hear it. “Irrelevant. I do not relinquish _my_ claim. All will be mine, in the end. Without her claim there are no other sources left. The judgement must be absolute death.” _I know I’ve heard that voice before_. I couldn’t place it- didn’t have access to the mind that contained those memories, now. But it had left a groove in my very being, once before.

The masculine voice objected. “ _You_ have interfered too often as it is. This assembly will not debate the validity of your claim until this cycle has played out. In the meantime- no absolute death. Banishment. The narrative must continue.” The other lights bobbed in agreement and I wailed- _no, no- send me back_ \- but it was too late. They were gone. They had never been. Time resumed.

My light trailed upwards and away- and I was reborn.

\-------------

They didn’t call me Sherriff at first of course, and I didn’t recall that name, not having brought any memories with me. I came blinking into the sunlight of a strange world as a new consciousness in a full-grown vessel, part of a compact among a caravan of traders, rolling across the great grasslands toward the western coast. They told me I was part of clan Bex, a wealthy family from the cities back East. I was born knowing how to manage the sails of the great grassland wagons, each being a wheeled wind rider and shallow-draft barge in one. I was born knowing how to aim and shoot a rifle. I knew very little else.

They told me that I was labor for the journey, that if I steered and shot along with my siblings, we would be made full members of the clan when the caravaneers reached their destination. For a time, that was enough. We traveled the great savannahs and sailed around the vast mountains via deep blue rivers. We traded with native infomorphs, and we fought off raids by ferals and infovore predators. Native information was so plentiful that we hardly stored any- every day saw us crossing new flora, new ways of measuring and recording and assessing the word, and we harvested them all. Several of my siblings were conceived for the sole purpose of holding onto those samples without digesting them, for further study. But it was not an easy trip. The hazards were fierce, and the natives were not always receptive. Wagons broke, and disease swept the caravan at intervals. We lost more than one of my siblings to simple accident, falling from the masts or simply crushed beneath the great wheels.

The wind blew, and the ground moved beneath us, and gradually we died, on that hard road. It was many months before I noticed, but when I did it was inescapable- it was by and large _entirely_ my siblings and I who bore the risks. If a dangerous job in the rigging needed doing, or a predator needed rousting, we’d invariably be the ones sent. For a time it seemed to be our lot in life, and I did not question it. But one day, while hanging from the back of our wagon to scrape prairie corals from the outside of the officer’s quarters, I overheard a conversation. “They’re really dropping like flies out there, aren’t they! You think we brought enough spare vessels for this trip? If we lose too many more we’re going to have to camp for the winter and breed another batch!”

It was my wagon’s Bosun. It had charge of the rigging and sails, and was merciless in the assignments. But it’d always maintained that it was for the good of the caravan, and stood solemnly at every funeral. It was answered, in turn, by the voice of the First Mate, in charge of wagon security. “I swear somebody’s not putting good mind-stock into the punters. Half of them don’t know which end of a rifle’s dangerous. Still, better to keep them stupid. Some of them actually think they’re going to get an induction at the end of this trip, instead of a shallow grave. Ha! If anyone outside the clan even knew we’d bred them it’d be _all_ our asses in a waterlogged vessel at the bottom of the nearest ocean.”

I paused in my work, then, and discovered that I’d been gifted a _third_ talent, perhaps by one of the officers too ashamed to retain it any longer- a burning passion for _justice_. The mutiny was swift, and thorough. When the caravan reached the western shore at last, the settlement of Boatwright didn’t question that none of us seemed to be full members of clan Bex. They were simply grateful for the guns we brought, the ammunition and tools and trade goods that loaded down every wagon. When we tore the wagons down and built homes instead, they welcomed us with open arms. In our town I became the law man and de-facto leader, and my siblings called me Sherriff.

There were good years, and bad. Clan Bex came looking for the remains of their caravan, eventually, and we lost much of the town in driving them away. There were wars with the natives, and brush battles with other settlements, and the occasional brawl with some drunkard or lawbreaker. With each new conflict I rode out, six-shooter at my hip and rifle over my back, and killed far more than my fair share of infomorphs. I would not kill for money, and eventually I learned to avoid killing in general except as a last resort. But I made mistakes. There were faces that would haunt me, those I could have saved, or might not have killed, glimpsed in the moments between sleep and waking. All of them were known to me, except one. _She_ , and I knew it was a she, remained a mystery. But it was for her that I never took a partner, never found love. Something deep within me knew I’d get back to her some day. The quiet madness of loving someone I’d never met, someone so deviant as to be _gendered_ , kept me withdrawn, isolated from others.

The railway linking the coasts was completed, after many years in that wilding place. Eventually soldiers came, said they were from back East, that the clans had formed a government. That we were all going to be part of it, by hook or by crook, and we’d need to pick leaders, and follow these laws, and pay taxes. Well, we didn’t take kindly to it. The people of Boatwright were an odd lot, outcasts and clanless and wanted morphs and deviants, stuck together at the edge of the world more out of necessity than anything. My siblings and I, those who’d survived these decades anyway, we were all unregistered births, clanless in the eyes of the law. We had nothing to gain and everything to lose, we thought. So we banded with other cities, and we fought.

It was long, and it was bloody, and terrible. The power of the repeating rifles from the East was overwhelming, but we knew the land. They had to scrape us off every rock and out of every valley. Every one of my relations was killed, eventually, and after long enough I forgot why I’d begun fighting in the first place. The war stopped feeling _just_ and started feeling like it just _was_ , and that was when I quit. One day I just took off my uniform, put my things on my back, and walked away from camp. I heard they didn’t take kindly to deserters back in Boatwright, and I was still unwelcome back East, so I built my own homestead. Lawless and alone, I lived off the plains and took care of them folk as found their way to me.

Eventually the war ended, a stalemate- the West formed a loose coalition of city states and got a government all their own, and the East gave up on the conquest  and went back to building. I didn’t see the point of any of it. After another ten season cycles, a community had grown up around me. Other deserters, and those too wild or attached to freedom for the bigger towns. We took care of each other like my siblings and I had done, in the old days. And try as I might, I was still their Sherriff. I spent my days getting drunk off my ass on the strangest patterns I could find, and my nights dreaming of _her_. 

One day I was sitting out in our fields, keeping an eye out for the great fat grass-ticks that had been latching on to our vessel herds lately. The ticks were vulnerable things, easily killed if you weren’t currently their host- if you _were_ , they’d eat the memories of themselves right out of you and you would die of starvation without ever understanding why. I was walking the herd, doing an inspection when a young morph came up to me. I knew it by reputation as a respectful one, but we’d never talked. “Zer Sherriff?”

I wasn’t in the mood for company, but I turned anyway and met it. “Yeah, kid?”

“I was just wondering- I hear that back East, morphs can live practically f’rever. Like there’s people there that are five hundred cycles old! But you’re only a few decades past a hundred, and you’re the oldest person here by far. Where’s all the old people?”

I sighed. The young were so _quick_ to forget, now. “Dead, kid. You don’t get that old out in the wild lands, and these _are_ wild lands, even if the last war was two decades ago. We’ll tame them some day, but until then- if you want to be fat and happy and live to 300, you get to Boatwright, and you take that train as far East as you can go.”

He thought about that for a while. We were still a free people, he really _could_ have picked up and left, and not a one of us would have said boo. “Well then, why are _you_ still here?” he asked, eventually. “If it’s so great and all back East.”

I paused, then, and took another hit off the wildroot nodules I’d been carrying in my vessel’s digestive pouch. The scrambled information in them staggered me, briefly, and the world softened a bit in my perception. “I ain’t never been, kid. But as to your question… this is _home_ , for me, and I guess I ain’t so attached to living, as all that. I wouldn’t walk away just to get more centuries if I didn’t know what kind of centuries they’d _be._ ”

It walked beside me for a while, looking at the herds as we passed. “There’s this other morph, in town. We grew up around each other, and they _get_ me, and I get them. We want… I don’t think it would be so bad, to go East and live, if they were with me.”

I nodded casually, not looking at the kid. “You hold onto that. Hold on tight. People’s what makes this world worth sticking to. What’s your name?” The kid told me- Aimer. We never grew _close_ , but- I kept a lookout for Aimer after that. Like one of the siblings I’d lost long ago.

Another couple of decades passed, and the town grew and the land got tamer, and I begin to contemplate the prospect of a two hundredth birthday, somewhere down the line, still alone in my travels. And then one day I was woken up by a cry from the town square- rustlers had stolen a herd of vessels in the night, and Aimer had been out among them. The rest- well, you remember it. The chase, the firefight, the rescue, and dying in his arms in that cave- only to find myself in a _new_ world, saved by _myself_ , the human me, from my own past. A past I could finally remember.

And I met _her_ , all over again and for the first time, and realized all my dreams, all my life, had been the lost memory of that woman I’d already known, once upon a time. But I had his memories now- my doubled-up consciousness was swimming easily through _both_. I didn’t know his future, even though I’d lived it once- only my inclination towards Haley had survived my round trip through time. Somehow, I don’t think the first version of me ever noticed my feelings- I suspect they got mixed up with his own for her, strong as they were.

I watched, and I talked to myself, and I helped out where I could- a shot placed here, sacrificing my ability to speak there, a moment of advice to firm up the courage somewhere else. My past self didn’t need much handling- by my count he had it more figured out than _I_ ever had. Then came that first terrible near-death, when the bullet took him in the leg, and our shared body lost consciousness. I found myself in the void once more, without truly considering my actions I slipped us out of the world of humans, and back to the plains of my home. In two separate bodies.

I had a moment of doubt. I eyed his back, as we stood there, and he knew what I was thinking. _If I’m tethered to him and he dies here- do I go back? Do I get that life with her to myself? Or am I stuck here, forever?_ He shamed me, then. I shamed myself. “I trust you, Sherriff. Whatever else you are, you’re an honorable person. I’d give my life to save yours, they’re one and the same, but-”

_But what kind of person would I be if I sabotaged my own self, eliminated those memories for another day with her? How would that even work, metaphysically?_ I stood up and came to stand beside him. “But it’s not our life we’re fighting for tonight. I won’t leave miss Haley in the lurch, you have my word on that.” And we didn’t stop fighting. But we _did_ leave her in the lurch, in the end. Days passed at the bunker and before I knew it I found myself, throat torn open, on that great white mound once again- for the first time, from both our perspectives. But I was swiftly remembering that I had been here once before.

One last time I returned to that void, ejected from our hardened sphere of shared story, but this time I anticipated it, and _remembered_. This time my mind was not lost to me. Sean’s whole life, and Sherriff’s, and then the strange amalgamation of both from the memories of his final week. One sequence of events, viewed twice, from the same mind in the same body at different points on its own timeline. I retained it all. Looking out then, I saw my original Sean-self split off and enter that great loop once again, arcing back to repeat history. The tribunal did not re-appear. Had it ever existed? But the me-that-was-me _now,_ that had taken that ride and now carried _both_ lives, didn’t move. I was… _free?_ Free of the burden of that causality loop, free to choose my next move outside the world that was my home, as long as I did not return to it. Banishment, they’d said. There were other spheres nearby, abutting our home, and one of them seemed strangely familiar. I dove into it-

\-----------

I was standing in the endless gardens. Not reborn, I noted mutely- I supposed Wonderland might not _have_ anything analogous to birth. You entered it whole of body or not at all. Perhaps it remembered me from my past visits. Distantly I could see the castle of one of the Queens- I forgot which suit, at the moment. The first thing I did was check my body. _Human again, then._ I even had my weapons, the pistols Haley had enchanted for me, what seemed like a century ago by my time. But also just hours behind me. I stumbled then, and held my head. Human brains were not _meant_ to contain the kind of memories that mine was now assimilating. I continued checking my person- my ring was missing? A memory flashed, then, of Flagg slipping it off my finger as I collapsed. _That_ ** _bastard_**.

I was Sean now but also Sherriff. I was both, and neither. An old soldier and a young husband. We meshed astonishingly well, our attitudes and instincts blending into one another seamlessly, except in a few areas. There was an enormous amount of friction around the use of violence, for one. Sherriff, for all his reforms, was still a cold killer at heart. Sean would rather die than point a gun in less than the most extreme self defence. I had to look away from that whole area of my mind, lest I begin arguing out loud with _myself._ I began walking, instead.

It was inevitable that I’d find Cecilia, if I spent long enough in this place. When I finally found her, I noted that she’d come up in the world. She wore a noble’s robes with the heraldry of Hearts emblazoned on it, and sat in what looked, to me, like a lifeguard’s chair with a bullhorn. Two-dimensional card soldiery scurried about beneath her direction, maintaining the gardens and occasionally bodily lifting her chair and moving her along the hedge maze. They didn’t even glance at me when I walked up- no longer _intruder_ then, I supposed, but… _guest? Resident?_ I shuddered at the thought.

“Sean” she said, laying down her megaphone. “Welcome to the afterlife.” I grimaced at that. I _knew_ I’d died, I had a pretty good feel for that by now, but-

“Don’t call it that. You’re not even dead, you’re just a part of the _Dog_ , and in every sense that matters I’m still kicking, and I have all my memories. It wasn’t death in any way I’d recognize it, just a… long detour.” I walked alongside her chair as the guards hefted it once more.

“You’re _dead_ ,” she said, “and you’d best get used to it. You exited that story and you shan’t be going back. Even if the world _did_ allow it, even if you had a body on the other side, that barrier prevents any of us from crossing.” She reached out and rapped on thin air with her knuckles, producing a sound like a hollow iron box being struck. “See- it’s everywhere and nowhere, right up against us but totally impassable. But… it _is_ odd that you retain your body _here,_ and your memories. Usually you’d simply be reborn into some new form.”

I tapped the pistols at my hip. “Tried that once already today, and it didn’t take for very long. I passed the old narrative off to Haley. But I think my own story is still playing out.”

She nodded sagely. “Yes, almost anything sounds plausible if you start gabbling about narrative, doesn’t it?” I glared at her and she cackled. “Accept it! You don’t have the faintest _clue_ what’s going on, and neither do I.”

That _did_ bring something to mind. “But you _have_ had a clue, haven’t you? How is it that you, and Aslan, and Randall, and everyone we run into seems to know all about us?”

She turned in her high-chair and shouted at the card guards. “You there! I see you slacking! You think that just because I don’t chop heads, I won’t have you all shuffled like a blackjack deck in a Vegas casino? Back to work!” They scrambled, no longer paying attention to our words, and she turned back to me. “Got to take a firm hand with these fellows. Sean, you _know_ the answer. How do _you_ already know about _them?_ ”

I considered it for a moment, and the answer hit me like a wave. “ _Stories_ ,” I breathed. “We’re all _stories_. Each of them is just a literal story in our world. By extension… we must have been a story in theirs. Anywhere outside our own, people have been telling and retelling the tale of us. But that would mean…”

She grinned, “We know how it ends? Don’t look at me. They talk about it a lot around here- how sometimes if two worlds cross you’ll find some version of yourself, how you would have been had things gone different. But how they’ll be _now?_ Nope, sorry, _this_ version of us is an unknown from the inside. Some think if we’d heard our own version before, we’d just ‘Forget’ the parts we haven’t encountered yet. But _I_ think we’re altering all of time, backwards and forwards. A whole new version of events. The story we write between our worlds here will _become_ the story that everyone’s always remembered. That’s how Aslan works- the worlds he preys on, he _takes_ their stories, becomes the hero.”

It made a kind of sense. But it was disappointing as well. “So I guess you don’t know how it all turns out, huh. Then what _was_ the story, if we hadn’t collided?”

She laughed delightedly, and I could almost imagine her being that young girl I’d seen the first time we crossed paths. “Oh, that’s the beauty of it! I came from your world, of course, but once I got to Wonderland I looked you up. They have the most _wonderful_ libraries here, it’s remarkable that Carroll never mentioned them… anyway. Half the pages were missing when I found the book about you- a tatty old thing called ‘Dragon Wife’ by H&S McCarthy, wonder who _that_ could have been,” she waggled her eyebrows at me and I rolled my eyes, “and it was about a young couple who loved each other very much, and then one of them got turned into a dragon, and then… oh, their love only _deepened_ after that. Salacious!” She cackled again. I turned red, listening to the implication.

“Wait… you’re saying that the original copy of our story, the path we’d have gone down before all our worlds collided with each other, was a… a… _trashy romance novel?_ That I, or we, turned Haley into a dragon for some weird interspecies-” she was laughing so hard I was afraid she was going to choke.

“Yep! Hate to break it to you boyo, but half the known universe has probably seen into your bedroom. But,” and here she turned deadly serious, all humor dropping from her in an instant, “I would _never_ call it trashy. Absent any conflict, what did you two do?” _We loved each other._ I nodded, taking her meaning. It wasn’t the kind of story I had any interest in _reading_ , but- it was the kind of story I’d want to _be_ in, if I had to pick any at all. The kind with a happy beginning, middle, _and_ end. _And that was taken from us?_ She saw where my thoughts were going and shook her head. “Can’t get back there now, I’m afraid. She’s got a world to save, and _you_ ,” she waved vaguely in my direction, “have got to decide what to do with your life after death.”

I pondered that for a while. “I have to get back to her, but I can’t. She can’t come to me, she has a job to do. I…” I _hated_ this, but it was true, “I’ve learned how to wait. I can fill my time, as long as she knows I’m out here. Will you take a message to her for me?”

Cecilia nodded. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll bring you _closure_. Wiltshire Dog is coming, and he’s bringing you an old friend.” Somehow, I knew _exactly_ who she meant, and my grin was fierce and predatory.

Some time later- the world shimmered, slightly, and I was surprised I could see it. _Previously when Wonderland changed, it tried to distract me, hide it from me. I guess it no longer considers me an outsider_. A door formed in the hedgerow, and Cecilia and her guards bustled away at top speed. I waited next to it, still and silent as death. _Ten bullets left_ , _after the Lion tried to eat me. That’s all I have to finish this._ One would have been enough- I was _motivated_. The door opened, presently, and Randall Flagg stumbled out. He looked somewhat worse for wear- right hand shriveled and red-raw, like it was _regrowing_ , winded and cursing. _Guess Haley got a shot in after all_.

I stepped up behind him. The Sherriff in me wanted to give him no chance, put a bullet in the back of his head and be done with it. The Sean in me disagreed. _He sidesteps death as easily as we do- play for time, give he more room to work._ But… _I do want to see his face when he realizes_. “Hello, Randall,” I said. “I threw that stabbing, you know.”

He whirled, his face a rictus grin of fear and vicious hatred. “ _Fucker._ You should be _dead_. Where’d you send me, dog? You telling me to go to Hell?” He cackled madly. “Been there, done that, got the postcard!” That unsettling laugh cut off, and he refocused on me. “If you’re the trial he’s set me, I guess it’s my lucky day. I already _know_ how to kill _you,_ ” he said swiping a finger across his neck viciously. It would have been more effective if that memory didn’t seem both a century and a few hours old, to me. As it was it merely created an interesting ripple where _half_ my body shuddered, and the other half failed to react at all. He caught _something_ in my lack of affect, and his eyes widened. “Where have you-”

My right gun left the holster and pointed at his face in the blink of an eye. The pistols Haley had summoned for me were beautiful, I thought, appreciating them with the eye of a master examining his instrument. Perfectly tooled, chromed with an inlaid silver dragon down each barrel, mouth ending at the tip. So easy to use it felt like _cheating_ , so devastating that anything I shot was torn apart by fire and thunder. They weren’t _Roland’s_ guns, forged from fragments of Excalibur itself, but I figured they’d serve just fine. “ _Away,_ Randall,” I said, staring at him down the barrel. I put the weight and hatred of a century of warfare into my stare, and it shook him. “I’ve been _away_. Settler, soldier, sherriff- time moves _differently_ out here, and you gave me a hundred and fifty years of _practice._ ” He began to back away, step by slow step, horror dawning on his face. And they said revenge wasn’t satisfying! “You’ve always had _problems_ , haven’t you, Walter Padick. Marten Broadcloak. Covenant Man. _Walkin Dude._ Problems with _gunslingers._ ” He broke, then. Saw the shape of the story I had crafted, built with his own help, and knew where it ended for him.

The man in black fled across Wonderland, and the gunslinger followed.

\----

Skylar, In The Throne Room

Present

\----

Skylar cried out as the tower shook, lost in the mist and terrified to run for fear of falling off one of those tall balconies. There were sounds of gunfire now, and she couldn’t see her brothers or sister. She kept low to the ground and began crawling, instead, hoping to find the others before the men found her, once again. Instead she found the dais, the four thrones. Her life seemed like a great well sometimes, a tremendous slope where no matter what force she exerted, she ended up closer to those things than before. Piper was there- she had already given up, sat on one. She looked at Skylar with despair. “What else can we do?” she asked. “I want this to be over!” Skylar agreed, but… not like that.

Her brothers found them soon enough, drawn by that same inevitability. Hayden had taken a bullet, somewhere, and his arm was covered in great gouts of blood but he still stood, grimacing, at the base of those thrones. Boden came to her and held on tightly, like he would be pulled away by the force of the terrible things. “Skylar, I don’t want to go in the chair! I don’t want any of this anymore! I just want daddy!” he sobbed, and she felt tears in her own eyes. She was nearly 11, she knew she was _mature_ , but she had never been ready for any of this.

The gunfire died, and footsteps sounded. Skylar readied herself. If it came to it, she’d die before she got in those thrones, she decided. No matter _who_ tried to make her.

But it wasn’t one of Flagg’s men, coming out of the mist. It was… an _alien_. Not human, not infomorph. Not any of the kinds she’d seen, anyway. It stood on two legs, with two long arms, like a human. But it had a black insectoid carapace, and a hard white chitinous head with two huge faceted eyes and a pair of antler-like mandibles extending upwards. It wore a _dress_ , or perhaps more accurately an elaborate and high-collared red leather duster, and it carried a long, pointed rifle more fantastically futuristic than all the guns Skylar had seen so far. It was flanked by two more of its’ kind, and around its neck… the necklace given to her by Aslan. She recognized it- _her-_ then, at long last. “Miss D? You changed again!”

The insect-woman laughed, rich and mellow. “And you’ve stayed just the same! We’ve had a hundred years in a time chamber with nothing but our minds, a handful of genies, and a pile of electronics full of every secret of biology and physics known to your race, little one. We took the opportunity to make some _changes_. But we’ve kept an eye on you during your long stair climb- you were the _only_ one we could watch, in fact, until your ring and Hale’s cut out. When the simulacra went silent, we knew where we’d find you. And Haley put our minds to solving your Lion problem, as well. Come away from the thrones, children. We’ll get you medical attention, take you where you need to go.” The others quailed but Skylar calmed them. She _knew_ Miss Delmutt wouldn’t offer her any harm. They’d been dragons together, just this morning!

Together they walked from the misty chamber of thrones, to the balcony and the sky-car hovering there, as if by magic. This high up, the sun hadn’t fully set over the horizon yet, and the children blinked in the red-yellow glow. Several more of the humanoid vessels were hauling a massive pallet off the back of the vehicle. “What’s _that,_ ” Skylar asked, pointing at the device. It looked like a large metal cone with a black tip, 6 feet long and 2 feet wide at the base. There was something written on it but she couldn’t make it out in the scurry.

Delmutt waved the thing inside the throne room, and the kids onto the hovering vehicle. “Just a loose end, and an end to your throne problem. Never you mind. _Your_ attention should be on what’s _inside_ the dragonfly.” There was a piece of furniture in there, incongruous among the jump seats and military hardware.

Skylar looked at it in shock. “Is that…”  
Delmutt nodded. “Yes, I believe it is. We picked it up on orders from Miss Haley, before she was cut off. Before we get away from here, we need you to do us one last favor- _open_ it.”


	24. Chapter 24

\----

Haley, At The Tower

\----

Aslan blinked, and I snapped my head out on some primal instinct, biting him by the neck and _slamming_ him into the ground before unloading my fire breath into him between clenched teeth. He was smaller than me in stature, but I had no illusions about the damage I was doing- in a fight between near-unkillable titans, acts like this were purely about keeping him off balance for as long as possible. I picked him up and flung him away across the field, as his back legs kicked out and tore a vicious gash across my chest. I threw him towards the area that had been bleachers not too long ago but was now some kind of tiered colonnades, holding up the tower above us. One interesting thing about battling with deific strength, I mused as he flew, was that nobody got any _heavier_ as you got stronger, so things like a throw became much more effective as a delaying tactic. “ _GO_ ” I shouted at the Colonel as I raced in the opposite direction, toward the rising dust of Aslan’s impact. I didn’t wait to see if he took my advice.

As I charged at the tower’s rising wall, I fished in my bag of tricks. I no longer had access to the wish engine thanks to Aslan’s bullshit ability to just disenchant my ring, but I still had a _Handy Haversack_ loaded with every 1st through 4th level wand in Pathfinder and that gave me some options. Firepower wasn’t the key here- this fight was about _control_. Buying time for Delmutt and the Wiltshire Dog to carry out my orders, sent via telepathic link while the gate was still up.

Roy I’d sent by cell phone to disable whatever makeshift receiver the Colonel had attached to his warhead, and then escape with the remainder of the guard. The Dog, I’d asked to wait at the top of the tower and sidetrack Randall, who I assumed would be bringing the kids there while pursuing his own tower-based agenda. Delmutt- when I finally caught up to her, after 10 minutes out here or _100 years_ in the Haley Dimension- I asked to go and find me a very specific piece of furniture, and bring it back here. I could only hope she’d been able to gate out before my connection was severed. In the meantime, I needed to delay this powerhouse as long as possible. I had no illusions about being able to kill him- or that it would even _take_ , if it did. I was just a speed bump for now. But I’d tear his axle off anyway, if I could.

_Nothing that targets him directly will last_. Self-buffs, conjuration and evocation only then. I began reaching into the bag and passing wands from claw to wing, casting as I went. _Earth Glide_ and I slipped beneath the dirt of the stadium, protected from reprisal. _Summon Monster IV_ and dozens of fiendish bulls began to pop up around the arena. _Greater Infernal Healing_ to see to my injuries, _Black Tentacles_ and a dozen pit traps of writhing nastiness sprung up around his likely exit points from the sidelines. I threw one spell after another intended to trip, or grapple, or disarm, or interfere. Anything to slow him down.

It did no good. The marble pillars of the colonnade simply _exploded_ inwards towards me as he came roaring back. His blood was up now, so at least I had his _attention,_ but the force of him was like nothing I’d ever felt. It occurred to me then that we’d never really seen Aslan _fight_ , in the stories. He’d never needed to, outside of the occasional mauling. But oh he was ready to fight _now_. “YOU DARE” he thundered, and the entire field _shook_ , throwing my summoned beasts to their knees. “ **YOU DARE,”** he roared again, and the shattered stone around him began to form itself into giant-sized humanoids- golems, then. “ _I will pluck you from this world as a physician cleans a wound, Dragon. It will be_ ** _sterilized_** _of your presence.”_ The earth itself began to respond to his command- the field separating around me as I swam through it, leaving me exposed. He opened his mouth once again, before I could flap my wings or leap to safety, and a _radiance_ formed above him. He was still roaring but it had taken on a song-like quality, an aspect of Creation now, and the thing above him was looking an awful lot like… _like a sun_.

A beam of pure golden fire lanced out and took me square in the chest. My draconic qualities granted me immunity to the heat, but there were other energies at play. It felt like divine _lightning_ , seizing every muscle of me, leaking from fingertips and eyes and the end of my tail. I could feel it scouring the surface of me, tearing away bits and pieces in a never ending torrent. It was like being hit by God’s own sandblaster. I snapped out a _Dimension Door_ and emerged elsewhere on the field, panting, dripping blood from a thousand cuts and blasted patches of scale. From the outside that beam looked like a child burning ants with a laser, as it swept across my summons. His marble golems advanced, and the earth of the stadium itself was beginning to coalesce into a pair of giant forms behind him. His power began to sweep towards me and I was forced to _Dimension Door_ again, as my regeneration worked its slow magic. I popped a wand of _Cure Critical Wounds_ out and hastened it along.

I was doing this wrong. I _knew_ that. I could perhaps tackle him in physical combat, but he was effectively immortal as long as his narrator- child or otherwise- was engaged with his narrative. I could throw summons against him, but he controlled the shape of the world itself on this battleground. Pathfinder’s low-level summons were simply not _enough_ , used one at a time, to turn the tide of this battle. Even as I dodged and thought, one of his golems simply _punted_ my fiendish bulls aside, bearing down on me. I needed to stop thinking… it hit me, then. _Like a monster._

In one sense, I’d received an insane power-up with my skill set. But as we’d been learning, in this brave new world when it came down to a clash of powers it was less about the absolute power-level and more about the narrative priority. Pathfinder was barely even a story, in a lot of senses- it was more like a toolset for communal storytelling. Versatile, but it was no wonder that most of what it could offer didn’t take priority over something as fundamental as the magic of a character who lay at the roots of much of modern fantasy. On the other hand, he had priority to spare, but no flexibility- he was too firmly bound to his story. _So what can I do that he can’t?_ _I can change._ I was fighting with the tools Pathfinder had given me- the tools of the villain, the unbeatable dragon, the non-player character meant for the hero to overcome. _Luke and Darth Vader, wasn’t it, Dog?_ He’d already blown up my Death Star, disabling the whole wish engine with an effortless roar, but- I didn’t have to accept that framing, did I? He had his _own_ assets and vulnerabilities.

A _Fool’s Teleport_ turned me invisible while making it appear that I’d teleported again. The monsters cast around for me, and I threw out a _Major Image_ of myself stepping out of another dimension door on the other side of the field. That wouldn’t fool Aslan for long, but- seconds were all I needed. Time enough for a _Sending_ to get the word out, and a _Shape Change_. By the time Aslan realized what I’d done, I was stepping out of another door right beside him, human once more.

“Hmm, there is no shame in surrender. Expose your neck and I’ll end it quickly,” the Lion rumbled, even as all his forces turned towards me. He was much _bigger_ when I was only six feet tall, I considered, even as I stared him down. He did not pause or give me any room to consider his offer, this time- his great white-hot orb swept its gaze around and towards me.

“No such luck. Just trying a different toolset. How do you feel about swords and cavalry?“ I asked, pulling the vorpal sword from my back and slashing it through the air, cleaving that ball- and everything behind it for several hundred feet- in half. The tower groaned as more columns fell away, and I hoped I hadn’t hit anything load bearing. Then the orb itself _detonated,_ and Aslan and I were flung in opposite directions, several of his golems disintegrated in the blast. I was scoured once again by divine energies, though this time they burned a bit less. _Odd._ I guessed the parts it had burned the first time hadn’t regrown. And I was lucky my soul wasn’t evil, or _whatever_ it was scouring, I supposed, or the fire might have burned me away entirely.

He landed on his feet, catlike, while I slammed in an undignified heap against another column at the edge of the field. The impact of it broke bones- I couldn’t place a hitpoint number on it, but between burns and breaks I wasn’t doing great, and the regeneration would take time I didn’t have now. His minions closed on me as I struggled back to my feet, sword stabbed into the ground for leverage. Blood was dripping from a gash along my head that was slow in healing, and my breath was coming in ragged gasps. “I guess this is where I say something heroic and make a final stand, and- oh, I blew _that_ opening,” I muttered, setting myself to charge into them. It didn’t matter. Quip or not, the cavalry I’d sent for came anyway, right on cue.

Slightly less than ten thousand angry clone-Haleys, each one a dragon in its own right, armed with wands of _Detonate_ and _Summon Monster IV,_ tore onto the field from every opening. Summoned from their battlefield outside they _swarmed_ Aslan’s summons and the Lion himself. The field was awash in fiery explosions and roaring elementals in the blink of an eye. Every golem and the two gigantic earth elementals made from the field itself were torn down or blown apart in seconds. Aslan himself seemed beset, buried under a pile of screeching, flapping, fire breathing lizards. I knew better than to hope it would _kill_ him, but- maybe it would _hold_ him?

No, even that was too much. As I threw healing magic at myself and raced to close the distance, he simply… stood up. Bearing the weight of a hundred dragons dogpiled on top of him, he stood up, and strode forward. He said one word, and it was calm, and collected, but it carried to the far corners of the stadium. “Enough.” I had just enough time to think _oh good, he’s a World of Warcraft villain now_ before he began to radiate. It was like his summoned sun, but worse in every way. The blinding white light was coming from _him_. “I am the scion of the Emperor-Over-The-Sea”, he intoned, and the luminance increased. My nearest clone-selves in the dogpile began to come apart under the unrelenting glare. As they died they reverted to snow and ash, evaporating into nothingness. “I am the song and the singer. Kingmaker, door-opener, keeper of the way _and_ the key. Scribe of the Deep Magic, judge from the depths of time. Your soul, _all_ souls, are mine to dispense of.” The columns of the tower itself were beginning to soften and _run_ under the heat of his presence, and my clones were now dying faster than they could reach him- they did not appear immune to his radiance. The area of scorched, liquified ground began to extend from him like a wave, toward me. Once again for the third time in as many minutes I could feel bits of me burning away, but- _it’s definitely less, now_. Not even enough to overwhelm my healing. I struggled forward against the pressure. He continued to speak even as he stood on what was, essentially, lava. “You do not know me, Dragon, but I know _you_ , and I judge you _unworthy._ My light is unbearable to mortals- let it scour you from this place, and know no more.”

The wave of energy coming off him strengthened _again_ , and the whole tower began to shed bits and pieces of the vaulted ceiling as he simply melted everything inside that place that might have been holding it _up_. I continued pushing forward against the light, dodging the falling rubble, leaning into the force as it blasted out everything inside of me it could reach. It wasn’t much, by the end. I saw his eyes widen when he realized I was still coming on, walking over that liquid fire and through the waves of his radiance, clothes burnt away but still with sword in hand. Finally I understood what it was he was burning _out_ of me, and I smiled at him. “How can you-” he asked, before I cut him off.

The sword _flashed_ , and he roared and reared back, one eye blinded. “I don’t think there was much that was _mortal_ left in me,” I said, pulling back for another strike. _Flash,_ and his belly opened even as he swiped at me with those great black claws. I ducked. “Congratulations, you cauterized the remainder and marked me as your equal, _idiot_. Not a god and a hero anymore, just _two_ gods, the dragon and the lion, fighting in a colosseum over who owns the world. And when you get into _those_ fights-” I raised my sword for the coup de gras- “it’s the one with the better bite that wins.”

He held up a paw and spoke weakly “Stay your blade, Dragon-”

“My. Name. Is. _Haley._ ” My sword flashed down and his head rolled at my feet, glassy eyed, and the radiance cut off. I was plunged into darkness for a moment by the contrast of it- just blackness and the sound of a strained and damaged tower threatening to come down at any moment. I stood panting, bleeding, trying to find my composure. Then the illumination began- once again, from his dismembered body. I looked at him in exasperation. “Oh you’ve got to be _fucking kidding me._ ” It seemed I was going to need to make one final stop, and quickly.

\----

Sean, Wonderland

\----

How interesting, I thought, that we’d reached yet another climax and here I was in Wonderland once again. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t let Randall Flagg run, that I ended him quick and clean. But I was not quite the Sean he remembered, and I had a mean streak to me. And I had reason to believe he’d escape a quick death anyway. When I chased him, I was in no hurry. I didn’t shoot him as he turned to run, instead following at an ambling walk. His mad dash across the terrain of Wonderland did him no good- he was an outsider here, and the world resisted him. Roots tripped him and hedges refused to part. As he exited the garden the branches of its bramble-fencing tore at him, and the card soldiers attempted to cut him down. _Those_ he stabbed, and I felt regret as I saw them die. I wasn’t even sure they were fully sentient, but… _every second he lives is some new life ruined, you idiot_. I picked up my pace.

He carried on for a good long time, busting through light forestland and leaping across tea sets, spinning out illusions and tricks as he went. One or two of them almost caught me. At a fork I saw him running up _both_ paths, and glancing down saw only one set of tracks, leading right. I raised my hand and my revolver spoke once, and the one running in that direction vanished as though it had only ever been a trick of the light. The one on the left looked back and cursed, and _that_ was the one I gave chase to.

Later, I caught him on the shoreline with a hostage. It was a talking walrus, too big to get out of his way, and he held a hunting knife to its throat, grinning at me. “Well now, lawman, how do you feel about risking an innocent? One step closer and it dies,” he said, poking the knife into flesh. The walrus _squealed_ and shook, and I paused for a moment. He said no more, only watching warily, and after a second’s hesitation I stepped forward. There was something _about_ the scene that registered as unreal to me, and I trusted the instinct. He jammed the knife into the beast’s throat and it fell to the ground, thrashing mightily- for a moment my heart skipped, as I saw a vision of my own death once again. But I kept walking forward, and the smile dropped from his face before he- and the walrus- simply vanished once again. _Whew_. More tricks, illusions to delay me.

Wonderland itself lead me to him, in the end- it reacted poorly to his presence. Everywhere he ran, things turned sour. Dark things crawled from the ground, the opiate-smoking caterpillars shivered with mad dreams, the plants themselves withered and grew sour. I had no need to ask which way he had gone- I simply followed the trail of destruction and allowed him to tire himself out, never letting my guard down.

It saved me in the end. I was tracking him through a brook and down a hill when he sprung his ambush on me. As I crossed the narrow channel he rose up out of the water like a troll from the tales of old, and slashed that knife with his good hand at my hamstrings. I jumped forwards and that saved my mobility but earned me a wicked cut across the heel of my foot, instead. As I fell down the hill I controlled my roll, pistols out, until the creek came into view again but he had already vanished. Still- he was present, not running anymore.

I stood, gingerly on the one heel, and took in the scene. A summer breeze blew across the long grass of the hill. Not a cloud in the sky, not a creature to be heard. It would have been idyllic if an invisible devil wasn’t trying to murder me for the second time that day. But he’d chosen the wrong battlefield. I let my hands fall to my sides, closed my eyes. Extended the senses that Sherriff had learned to rely on in a hundred years of battle on the wild prairies of his home. The sound of wind on the grass, the smell of water and dirt, the faintest _tremor_ of movement and sound as a man brushed against a plant- _there_. My hand snapped up and I took my second shot, thundering so loud that the grass around me was blown back and the grass around _him_ was set alight in small blazes when it hit. He screamed and fell to the ground, and I walked towards him, stomping out the fires where I could.

He’d taken it in the shoulder and lost more-or-less his whole damn arm, the one with the good hand. He lay on the ground panting. “Well? You going to kill me or you want we should run a while, yet?”

I crouched down, never taking my eyes off him. “If I kill you, you may end up back in Haley’s world- maybe a little worse for wear, maybe not. And I can’t get back there. So I need to take my _time_ with you, understand?” He looked a bit confused. “I don’t have any intention of letting it end so soon, Randall. The madness in Wonderland goes a lot deeper than you, or I, have ever seen. I thought we might explore it _together._ ” There was real fear in his eyes now. “You have something of mine, see.”

Realization dawned on him and he snatched out the ring he’d stolen. “Take it then, and fuck you!” He threw it at me with his bad hand, and I stepped forward, letting it bounce off my chest. As I’d anticipated, he went for the knife when he anticipated I would be distracted. I booted it out of his fingers and into the long grass, then placed a foot firmly on his chest. He spit at me. “What? What more can you want from me? You want me to tell your fucking _future?_ Let me get my _cards_ , gunslinger.” He laughed at his private joke, but I didn’t remove my boot.

A war was taking place inside me. _Shoot him, damn it_ , insisted the side of me that was Sherriff. _He can’t dodge death if it’s standing on his chest_. Sean balked, though- he was a rotten piece of shit but he was dead anyway, if he kept bleeding, and Sean had no stomach for cold-blooded murder. The two of me struggled, back and forth, and my gun swung up but did not fire. Instead, I asked one word. “Why?”

He paused, at the question. His blood was still flowing, gradually staining the ground around him red. I knew he didn’t have a huge amount of time but I wanted my answer. He looked me in the eye, for a while, and eventually spoke without anger or prevarication. “What else could I do?”

I swung my pistol slightly, in an encompassing gesture. “I don’t know. _Anything?_ All your power, your mind, your tricks. You dance from ruin to ruin, in King’s books. Yet everything I know about you says you’re the greatest slave of all. That’s why Aslan had no fear of you. He knew that no matter what you did, it would probably serve him in some way if he was the victor. And here you are. At the same end you always reach. Why bother?”

He grimaced and broke eye contact. “We are not all so free as you. We can’t all be the _protagonists_. There are things out there beyond our stories, you know. You don’t want to see what happens when _they_ get involved.” Images of the tribunal outside of space and time that I’d witnessed flashed in my mind and I shivered. “I asked you earlier today- if all stories are real, _where’s God?_ I’ll tell you where- they _ate_ Him. Maybe- “ and here his grin returned- “you’ll see what I mean some day?” The sly old devil looked at me and despite his appearance I _felt_ it, the weight of the years in him, thousands of them, _millions_. Despite everything he’d done, the faintest flame of sympathy lit in my heart. “So I dance my dance and I take my small victories where I can, my revenge against the stories that rule us, and the real key, I’ve found-” he moved like lightning, jamming a switchblade up into my calf with that red-raw hand of his- “is to always carry a second knife.”

I roared and fell back, and heard him cackling. Even as I gripped my leg and sat up the sound was fading, carried away in the wind like a thin fabric. In the matted grass where he’d been laying- a set of bleached white bones was laying with a shattered shoulder. Like he’d been dead in that place for a hundred years or more. I knew that trick. _He’s on his way back then. So much for sympathy._ I took the ring from the ground, and called to the Dog.

\----

Haley

\----

Night was falling as I crashed to the balcony of the throne room with a mighty _THWUMP_ , thoroughly startling the two infomorph guards- I _assumed_ they were infomorphs, anyway, that or chitinous aliens. My wounds had not finished healing before I’d stuffed the Lion bits in my upended _Handy Haversack_ and hauled his carcass up the tower, flying as hard as my wings would carry me. Even as I rolled inside I could feel the sack beginning to pulse and kick- he was coming together and waking up, and he was going to be _very_ unhappy when he did.

Delmutt- or something I _assumed_ was Delmutt, with a new body- and the children were standing inside, along with the nuclear warhead and a large steamer trunk. I raced towards them and they quailed at the sight of a huge bloodied dragon charging forward like a steam locomotive. All except Skylar, of course. She grinned and placed her hand on the trunk. _No time for niceties._ “ _NOW,_ kids!” I shouted, hefting the sack. Skylar _pulled_ and the other three quickly joined her, prying that trunk open- as the lid came loose I felt the strangest breeze from it- cool and wet, wind from another world, I supposed. I stifled it swiftly, stuffing the entire _Haversack_ full of pissed-off god cat into that trunk and then jumping back. The children shoved it closed even as an earth-shattering roar began to build- it escalated to ear splitting volume in milliseconds and then _vanished_ , a physical weight off of all of us the second that lid fully closed. Aslan had left the building.

Boden kicked the side of the chest. “And _stay_ out!” I couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment.

Delmutt nodded at me. “Miss Haley. Now what? My ring failed when yours did, and the gate we used is miles from here, at their home. This trunk will not hold for long.” Indeed it was already rocking and shaking- as long as his narrator was alive, it seemed, it would remain an active pathway into our world. I wasn’t about to hurt a single one of the kids, assuming they were even responsible for him- I had my doubts. And I couldn’t detonate the nuke to destroy it and the thrones except as a last resort- too much collateral, without the wish engine to evacuate everyone. I paused, weighing my options.

“It _has_ to be the nuke. I can’t just teleport the thrones and the trunk into the sun. It has to be _neat_. The weapon of their dupe, maneuvered into place by their own machinations, detonated by the victor to put a cap on their story. We’re half a mile above the ground and I can limit the fallout, but it has to end with this bomb.” I steeled myself to tell the others to get in the car and go. I’d set it off myself if I had to. I _might_ survive if I made it through the blast wave.

“Ahem.” A polite throat clearing, from the ceiling. We turned and there standing upside down above us was the Dog. “I come bearing a letter, and a gift.” He _horked_ and a slightly damp envelope fell out, along with a ring. _Sean’s_ ring. The writing on the letter was simple, blocky- he’d always had terrible handwriting. It just read “To Haley.” All my breath left me in a rush, and I sat down hard on the ground. I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. _He’s alive_. 

The Dog prompted me. “Revelations later, evacuations now. Put it on and end this, Flagg will be back soon.” I did as he asked. Whatever Aslan had used to deactivate our gates, Sean’s had not been in active use at the time- or his power did not cross stories in that way. Regardless, the ring worked- I felt my telepathic bond light up as my finger extended into that space, connecting me to my simulacrums. They’d been- I turned to Delmutt. “You turned them into _shrines?_ ”

She shrugged. “Hundreds of two-ton horse sized dragon statues, still breathing and blinking but all standing perfectly still throughout our cities for decades on end. Why _not_ decorate them? Things kind of built up from there.” Ugh, their idolizing me was going to turn out to be a _thing_ wasn’t it. The simulacra shook the ribbons and incense off, stepped down from their little pagodas, and began their candle ceremonies once more. First I multiplied myself until I had as many clones as I could realistically handle- perhaps two hundred thousand. Then I wished the time differential between our two planes down to the normal max, double-time for them- that was quite enough of _that,_ I didn’t need them diverging by aeons while we sorted out the planet _._ Finally _,_ I began snapping people up. First the air car and Delmutt and the kids, but then expanding. Roy had lead his men into another pocket realm, and I found that for once I didn’t even need a spell- being the defacto owner gave me some interesting perks. I simply squeezed them all out into the main dimension, spilling them out into my central park. Aslan’s men, the vast majority of whom were still alive, thankfully, I ported into a separate holding cell. I’d figure out what to do with _them_ later.

I did some quick calculations. A 350kt airburst around 2,500 feet in the air was probably not going to leave an enormous amount of fallout, but the air blast and thermal effects would probably injure or kill in a 10km radius. That covered more-or-less the entire city, from here. At least they’d all be susceptible to my teleports with no further story interference. Across the potential blast radius Haleys appeared, one for every living person I could detect, and asked for consent to get them out of harm’s way. It went… poorly. Maybe ten percent agreed immediately. The rest resisted and had to be snatched and thrown through portals. I didn’t win any brownie points, but finally it was done. All but one who refused to go, one who I owed a moment of my time.

I found the Colonel at the base of the tower. I guessed he hadn’t gotten all the way out of Aslan’s range after all, because horrifying burns covered half of his body. He coughed weakly and looked at me blearily with one good eye. “Come to see me off then? Tell my kids, I did right by them.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t. You tried to kill them, because you felt like you _owned_ them, and pride wouldn’t let you ask for help. And now you’re risking my timetable for some grand exit. Fuck you.”

He snarled at me. “You stand there so high and mighty with all your power and dictate to the rest of us. _We_ have to face this world with nothing but our hands and our minds. So what if I compromise myself, to win? You’d rather I should have lost with clean hands? The whole world in darkness but at least I didn’t betray my _values_ , is that it? Let me die in peace.”

I knelt down next to him and hit him with the infernal healing. His eyes widened as he felt his body knitting back together. “You dirtied your hands and you would have lost anyway. You’re _not_ dying, I have no reason to let you. You’ll live a long life, and your kids will know who and what you are. It’s not for me to judge your ethics. It’s for the ones who have to come after you. The ones who get to live in the victory you’d have carved from their bones.”

With that I snapped him out of that reality, and left one final spell over the bomb’s detonator.

\----

Randall Flagg, The Throne Room

\----

Randall Flagg stumbled out of the materializing door. “Ha! Can’t keep me down, dog! Now get over here, I need new _shoes_.” He paused. The grand room was empty. Night had finally come to the tower, and everyone was gone. From the balcony at one end, he saw the very last rays of the setting sun disappear. “Now where’d everyone get to?” Then he noticed it. Sitting by the four thrones, a quaking, rocking trunk with cracks beginning to appear. And next to it on a wood pallet, a 5 foot tall black metal cone. The nuclear warhead of a _Minuteman_ ICBM, unless he missed his guess. On the surface of the metal a message had been painted- “No gods, no kings.” Above the bomb a small golden _Mage Hand_ hovered briefly, before descending into the casing. He had just enough time to grasp his situation and mutter “Ah _shit,_ not again.” Then the fire took lion, and thrones, and man all alike.

\----

Haley

\----

Distantly, I watched as a blinding radiance shattered the tower, casting it to the ground like a child scattering blocks. I could see a swarm of my clone-selves already on hand with spells to shield and channel the radiation and purify any fallout. But the explosion itself, I wanted. An end to the tower, to Aslan, and a signal in the form of a miles-tall fireball to any other stories that might come sniffing.

_We’re still here. We bite back. This is not our end, this is not your weakness to exploit. This is a beginning. Just watch where we go now._

When the remainder of the unfiltered blast slammed into and through me, it was as a wave of force that felt good on my armored skin. Cleansing. As the sound crashed around me, so loud that it felt like the earth was shaking, I turned and headed for the nearest gate. I had plans to set in motion, and a letter to read.

\----

**END OF ARC 2**

\----


	25. Interlude - Millennium, Part 1

\----

Delmutt

30 minutes before tower explosion

\---

Delmutt stood on the threshold and looked at her people. They numbered just over ten thousand, packed into the blank white void of the evacuation dimension. The closest of them turned to look at her, as she crossed over from the stadium field. They didn’t really understand- not yet. She’d found them a place of safety, a place to rebuild and recover their strength, to hide away from the increasingly lethal world until they were ready to save the rest of their kind. _But it will mean centuries of isolation, before we see the outside again._ She hadn’t found her partner and lover Zeno before stepping in. It was unlikely he was here, when there was so much of the wide world of humans that he could have been sent to. _All of us, separated from our families. Will we be recognizable when we come out?_ She could only do her best to ensure that.

She sent a mental request to Haley via the simulacra network, and without any further response the evacuation dimension _shifted_. They all moved simultaneously in some direction none of them could understand but all of them could feel, merging wholesale with her pocket world. It felt like a fog rolling back. A bright blue sky marked with clouds opened up overhead, and the collected infomorph people gasped and cheered as parkland and fantastic, gigantic buildings began to appear from the fog on every side of them, even _above_ them, suspended from great woven-branch bridges and even stranger structures, high into the air of this place. _There is room for worlds here, worlds on worlds,_ Delmutt thought in wonder. _We will not lack for space in our prison, at least_. Several of Haley’s simulacra flew down amid cheers waves. Animated, Delmutt knew, by some facet of her subconscious but not directly controlled by her at the moment. The time dilation here was too great.

One of them opened its mouth and Haley’s voice boomed out, amplified. _“_ Welcome,” it said, “to _Volo Ingenium_. A lifeboat, a world and a wish engine. This is a pre-recorded message for all visitors. If you’re here, it’s likely I have had to evacuate you because of some catastrophe. You should know that for the engine to function optimally I have accelerated time to the breaking point. Six seconds in the real world is a year to you, now. It may be some time before I am able to get you out or slow things down. My simulacra will take your instructions, to a point- you can wish for virtually anything. I recommend securing your own food supplies as soon as you can. The shelter, as you can see,” the dragon gestured to the city, “is provided. Please stay out of the way of the dragons and djinn and return any unclaimed candles to the nearest collection point. I’ll be in to help you as soon as I can. Until then, uh... try not to die of old age?” The message cut out and the dragons settled back on the grass, breathing but otherwise motionless. Eventually some of the bravest of the ‘morphs on the fringe began to approach them.

Dainbex and Ayen, along with the roly-poly Vulkar and the beetle-like Cyran the quartermaster, soon found her. The doctor was in a real state. “You tricked us in here, you- _you_.” Too angry even to curse at her, she noted with amusement. But not a sentiment she wanted to spread.

“I didn’t. They were going to _execute_ us, or that other monster was going to do it, or we were going to get blown up by the bomb under the field. Now we’re safe and we have time to get ready.” That didn’t satisfy the little doctor.

“We’re going to be in here for a hundred years! I had a _practice_ to attend to, back home!” He really was in a state- this seemed more like a stress release from the last week than a reaction to his current predicament, she thought.

“You can have a practice here. Without war, without threats, we could _all_ survive a hundred years easily. Going home was never an option. But a new home?“ She looked around- there was a tower she liked, in the near distance. It looked like a series of gardens stacked one on top of the other until they towered dozens of stories tall, each one slightly twisted to give the ones above and below some rooftop surface area. Unidentifiable plants and greenery hung from every level. “I think that will be my headquarters.”

Cyran was confused. “Is this miss Haley’s plan again, from the other night? The one the stadium rejected, the night before we were all taken prisoner? Arm ourselves, make ready for war? What is it you want us to _do_ in here _?_ ”

Delmutt laughed lightly. The reality of this place was beginning to sink in. _Safe_. Whatever else they might be, they were _safe_ here. For as long as they needed. “We’re going to _grow,_ Cyran. Grow and change. We can be whatever we want to be here, between her magic and our people. Our food source is a thousand copies of the sum total of all knowledge of a more advanced civilization, and I don’t think they understand just how fast we _learn_. Our friend the merchant sailor mentioned a concept to me once, that I have seen expanded in the human literature- the Outside Context Problem. The curveball for a whole civilization. When we arrived, _they_ were our OCP- too advanced, too different. We have a unique opportunity- they were the superior culture to us, but in here we can _leapfrog_ them. For myself? I’m going to start a university. Tease out the secrets the humans already understand, and then grow beyond them. We won’t _need_ to be ready for war, if we are so far beyond them that war isn’t _possible_.”

\----

The days passed, and the people settled, and Haley’s simulacra provided. Infomorphs were unlike humans in the way they processed knowledge- what one knew, _all_ could know with very little effort, simply by copying relevant skill sets. This led to a quick and thorough uptake in basic understanding of human mathematics and science, but had drawbacks of its own- two thousand copies of one person’s understanding of calculus would produce less insight than several dozen independent studies interacting. Thus, the classic university model- infomorphs breaking down the theories and data that were provided to them, sharing it among each other, testing and refining it. Prepackaged understandings were released to the populace at large- an endless source of food and cultural advancement. 

Within a decade they had several hundred starter schools set up and providing a routine food source at every level of Hive Mutt, as they’d come to call it, the several-dozen-square-mile subsection of the eternal city that they had staked out for themselves with gigantic banners bearing her clan’s coat of arms. Improved vessel breeding programs had given them a wide variety of bodies, and there had even been some reproduction among the ‘morphs themselves. One of the new generation sought her out one day, sitting in her spacious office in one spire of the university. He was riding a hauler, probably part of the conversion crews modifying the buildings to be more amenable to their variety of scales and grips. “Lady Delmutt?” he asked, approaching with cap in hand.

“I’m not your _noble_ , child,” she said exasperatedly. Some of the initial refugees had been less enthusiastic about abandoning the clan structures, and she constantly had to stamp out strange little nodules of _hierarchy_. She hadn’t been a noble in her _past_ life, she wasn’t about to start now. Besides- nobody owned anything here, there was no resource scarcity, how could anyone presume to dictate to others what they did with their time? “I only run this place because people listen to me, you’re free to do that or not as you wish. What can I do for you?”

He was so nervous his vessel was practically quaking. “I- I wish to petition for the right to join your clan!” he spat out in a rush, squeezing his eyes shut. She found him simply adorable. “I’m young but I can ride a construction vessel well, and I have a quick learning curve, and I can produce offspring to aid in your labs _very_ quickly, and-” She couldn’t let him ramble any longer.

“You know I don’t really _do_ the clan thing, right? Mutt is just a name here, it has no real meaning- I was probably clanless anyway, if I’d ever bothered to check in. Why would you want to join?”

His anxiety only increased. She reflected that she really needed to figure out what it was about her that had everyone so _jumpy_ these days. “W-w-well a lot of the others are talking about _leaving,_ and they’re saying that things were better when the clans were in charge, and we were organized, and that you’re _already_ running things and clan Mutt is just trying to get rid of all the others and make us eat the fact they ever existed. I don’t believe any of that, b-but I _believe_ in what you’re doing, and I want to sign up.”

She sighed, and looked out the window. _Literally trapped in paradise and they’d burn it for that little edge of power over someone else_. _I’m beginning to understand why Sheriff thought I was naive, when I said we were better than humans._   “Alright, kid. What’s your name?” He told her it was Sha. And she named him Shamutt, first inductee to her clan in her living memory.

Eventually she found a solution to the political tension. She let them all come back, all the stupid old clans and the newer firebrands, and she brought back the clan council, and inducted as many into Mutt as it could take. She imposed some new rules, to keep them in their places- anyone could leave a clan they were dissatisfied with, at any time, and she made it clear that Mutt would always be open. She made sure her agenda was dominant, and then she left them to it. The backbiting and intrigue occupied the ambitious and the Machiavellian alike, and left her to get on with the work of helping her people transcend themselves.

Within another decade they had bootstrapped nuclear fission, using the knowledge gifted to them and the materials provided by Haley’s wishing. Their hives glowed with power when the nights came, and Hive Mutt glowed brightest of all. There could be no space program here in the hollow-earth of Volo Ingenium, but her researchers produced a great ecosystem of high-altitude blimps and service drones pilotable by a single lightweight vessel, and these became the first satellites of their new world, relaying radio waves at first, but swiftly more advanced forms of transmission as well.

Thirty years into their stay and they had reproduced the human invention known as the internet. Their food source was now infinitely more secure, and true universities began to spring up among the other clan-cities, who had no other hope of competing with Mutt in a society where resources were limitless and knowledge was the only true access to power. They were not simply studying human understanding anymore- on several fronts, they began to _advance_ it.

Fifty years in, the efforts of her teams began to bear fruit. A team of several young researchers, all crafted from amalgamations of the most brilliant scientific minds that the decades had produced, came to see her. “Lady Delmutt,” she _still_ hadn’t broken them of that habit, “you’ll want to see this.” They lead her up into the labs at the top of the first spire, where a strange device stood, an empty-looking vessel with cabling leading into its data-cavity sitting up next to it. It was a box perhaps five feet on a side, with a camera and speaker grill on the front. As she came into view the speaker _spoke_ to her. “Oh! Lady D! Look what we’ve done!” It was Shamutt’s voice, from that box. They explained to her, though she hadn’t held onto sufficient math or computer science to understand it- infomorphs lived in substrates that were _substantially_ more like the silicon chips that humans used for computing than their own meat brains. The transition of an infomorph mind from vessel to computer required some architectural changes, to be sure, but not _that_ many. Shamutt had been the first to cross that barrier. Infomorphs had transcended their physical bodies. Privately, Delmutt considered it the first time they truly surpassed human achievements, but it would not be the last.

More decades of furious effort followed. Miniaturization and speed improvements, of course, eventually allowed the vast majority of the infomorph population to live and interact in what they began calling info-space. It was like the old biological daisy chains they used to make with their vessels, but a million times larger and more intense. Not only did they typically find it far more comfortable interacting mind-to-mind, but further improvements allowed them to run their own minds at varying speeds, letting teams process _years_ of research in the dimensional equivalent of days. Fusion power was swiftly cracked, and autonomous robotics were fast approaching comfortable vessel standards. Then, things began to turn.

For the first time in 70 years Haley’s simulacra took off as one, heading towards a small park in one corner of the sphere. Satellite imagery showed Haley _herself_ in the park, far larger than all the other dragon-copies of herself. She was building something, _several_ things, and an expedition was mounted to go and speak to her, Delmutt in the lead. Unfortunately their high-speed options were largely limited to the areas around their cities, and long distance craft had not been a priority to date. By the time one was thrown together and the expedition arrived, several days late, their patron had already disappeared. But she’d left them a message, in the voices of all her clone sisters, who spread back out across the world and spoke as one.

“Delmutt. I hope you’re in here by now. Things went wrong, Aslan didn’t lose his narrators, and Sean… is gone. I need you to gate to Skylar’s home, find the trunk they pulled him from in the first place, and bring it to us at the stadium. I’ll delay Aslan as long as possible. If things start to go… any worse, I’ll try to message you again. Until then, do your best to get ready.” It really had been a close thing, Delmutt thought. In the real world, only 7 minutes had passed since she walked through that door. Had there been any delay at all… but there hadn’t, and the message was received.

With that, the fuse was lit. But it was a long one, from inside Volo Ingenium. Delmutt took precautions. Her people ceased relying on Haley for non-essential goods, instead designating certain portions of the eternal city-sphere “Deconstruction zones” and mining them down to the bedrock for stone, silica, iron, copper, wood and other base elements. More exotic materials they continued to wish for, in greater numbers, and stockpile as they went. They also began researching weapons. In hindsight, Delmutt would later reflect, this was her greatest mistake.

Twenty years later, disaster struck again. Delmutt was enjoying a jaunt in the real world for the first time in ages, having left infospace to test the new fully-programmable machine vessels. A single infomorph could run a pack of these at once, dancing between their near-sentient neural networks to set instructions and process feedback. It was like being in a half-dozen places at once- dizzying, exhilarating. She no longer envied Haley’s dragon form- if anything, she _pitied_ her, forever locked to one perspective. As she mused, a great cry went up from the other morphs on her work crew. The simulacra! They’d gone dead. Every one in the blink of an eye had simply stopped moving, responding. They still breathed, they still _lived_ , but- there was no subconscious will driving them. Haley was gone from their world in truth.

There was a great deal of consternation, after that. Much debate about what could or _should_ be done. Leave immediately on her great mission? Ignore her entirely and continue to build? Delmutt put several of her teams on the issue and tried not to worry about it. She had a greater issue to deal with, domestically.

The other clans made their move. Delmutt had known for some time that they were altering the spirit of her mandate- they had been compositing new citizens without imparting the explicit understanding that they were free to leave their masters at any time. Without even the _capability_ , it was rumored- some of them had learned to create new minds without even the capacity for true independence. It was an abomination, and she had attacked it politically with all her might, but it was not until Haley disappeared that the depth of the problem became apparent.

The Great Clan War lasted for 2 years, and it was the most terrible fighting her people had ever endured. Infospace was carved into tiny sub-domains, racked with terrible memetic agents and viruses. Real-space was full of autonomous drone swarms, piloted into combat by single infomorphs, dispensing weapons both conventional and nuclear throughout the vast cities as they clashed. Whole Hives were decimated, and at night one could look up from Delmutt’s spire and see the flashes of cities being bombed in the dark, hundreds of miles away across the sphere. Thousands of lives were lost- tens of thousands, perhaps. Infomorphs were far more robust than humans by now, but that only made the destruction that much more terrible.

Delmutt won, in the end, with a gambit she’d hoped never to use. Her expedition to visit Haley had recovered several of the artifacts the woman had produced, including gates to an antimatter dimension. She’d kept them in her back pocket for decades, but finally it became apparent that the other clans would simply not allow each other to exist. They could not conceive of a world without scarcity- to them, Haley was the source of their bounty, and in her absence it had to run out. So Delmutt did the one thing none of the other clans expected- she surrendered. To all of them, simultaneously. And offered as tribute, access to the antimatter gates, one for each clan. None of them could afford to refuse, to let the gates fall into the hands of hated enemies.

At the real-space gathering to discuss terms, she gave a speech to the assembled clan leaders, standing around the hall in a panoply of mechanical war-forms. “We came to this place as a life raft. A refuge to escape the predations of a world we couldn’t survive in. But we brought that world with us. The technology that made them so terrible, we now wield with equal ferocity. But the hate? The desire to dominate? We carried that inside all along. I didn’t understand that, once. I thought we _were_ better. Now, I grasp that we are not, but we _must be_. So, I offer to all of you a choice.” Her lone vessel, fully mechanical but stylized after her original woodcutter mantises, for fashion’s sake, produced a box. Inside were six small devices, each palm sized with a single button. They were distributed to the gathered clan leaders as she explained. “The choice is _peace_ , or _annihilation_. Within each of your hives my agents have hidden access points to a dimension of pure energy. Press the button in your hand, and the gates in all of your enemies’ cities will open. They will be destroyed, and you will be dominant.” The gathered delegates took their devices and eyed each other warily. “Of course, if they aren’t _home_ , they are free to push the button that will open the gate in _yours,_ as well. In fact, there is one place in Volo Ingenium that I can guarantee will not be annihilated- this very room.”

The final act of the Great War began. None could risk pushing the button while the others still had access, and none could take the chance of _losing_ their button and the threat of mutually assured destruction. They were pinned, trapped in her peace center by mutual hatred. Attacks on other cities ceased- why bother? Victory was already assured if they controlled the other buttons. All turned their attentions toward Hive Mutt, and her spire, once again. A great battle broke out over the Hive- whoever controlled that room would own the world! But any time one threatened to overtake the others, they’d gesture with their buttons, and the victor would back off. It was a bloody stalemate. Still, none would negotiate- not with victory so close. It was a roach motel, and once they’d entered not a single one could leave.

It gave her all the time she needed. While the leadership of their clans held guns to each other’s heads, she released memetic viruses into every infospace and realspace hive. She didn’t do much- these attacks were still considered an abomination by her people, and rightly so- but she did enough. Her weapons simply erased the memories of _which_ clan any of them had been fighting for, or against. Simultaneously her agents within each hive began releasing propaganda, hanging flags and insignia for _all_ of the clans, until it was entirely unclear which city had fought for which clan even by contextual clues. She even introduced _new_ clans that had never existed at all. Confusion reigned supreme. Many of the newest soldiers had been programmed for absolute loyalty, but… loyal to _who_? Her agents furthered the chaos by releasing “Secret orders” aimed at the many “Sleeper agents” within each hive. Even those who were _reasonably_ certain they knew which army they were a part of could not be certain they hadn’t been infiltrating all along!

She told the leaders at the peace center that she was doing this, of course. They made it worse, each rushing their last loyal agents to enemy armies, claiming that the whole organization had been working for _them_ all along. Paralysis followed- near-riots among every army, soldiers who _remembered_ fighting alongside one another for a decade now falling into hot debates about _who_ they’d been fighting _for_.

Into this maelstrom she gave her second, and final, speech. This one broadcast to the world, through every hive and outpost, to every soldier and civilian. “Hello. Some weeks ago I offered your leaders a choice, between peace and annihilation. But as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t really a choice- they’ve _always_ chosen the path to ruin, so long as they stand on top in the end. Now I take that cup from them, and offer it to _you_. All of you. There is no reason to fight anymore. You could secure victory at a terrible price, but for who? Yourselves, or those who claim to own you? They never did, and now you carry that knowledge in you.”

She paused, and looked at the leaders arrayed in front of her. They glared, still in their armored war forms, still poised on the brink of annihilation. “Many of us have read the human literature, their utopias and their dystopias. In many ways they parallel our own fiction. But the thing I found most tragic about their stories was that the greatest, most impossible thing they could imagine, the paradise on their earth or off it, was _cooperation_. Their technologies were already centuries ahead by our standards. There was nothing they could not attain, had they chosen. The thing that separated them from their dreams of utopia was not magic, or some trick of physics. It was the simple inability to _work together_ at any level beyond the tribal. I fear that this is a trait we share.”

She nodded, seemingly coming to a decision there on the podium. “So we will subvert it. I am going to introduce you to _new_ clans. Mutually dependent clans, with their own specialties, own areas of expertise. Science, Industry, Defense, Arbitration, Governance, Reproduction. You will be dominant in your chosen fields, and the others will depend on your progress. Within this structure there will be sub-clans, mutually reinforcing. You will work in teams with the members of the other clans. I want to emphasize, this is not a caste system. You will have no kings, no nobility. We are post-scarcity to an _absurd_ degree. When hierarchy is needed, you will form amalgams from _all_ your minds, and your children will lead you. This is my one and only dictation. Now, choose. Your old clans and your old war, or a new way. Peace or annihilation.” They chose, almost to a single mind, and their society changed.

Oh, it wasn’t as simple as all _that_. The old clan leaders did not go quietly, and Delmutt was unwilling to execute them en-masse. An entire infospace was set aside for them, with regular monitoring and intervention. There was a time of adaptation, and rebuilding. Governance became a problem more than once, before checks from a political wing of Science and a judicial wing of Arbitration were put into place to keep it acting as functionary and not nobility. The others clashed, and jostled, but it _worked_. Within a decade they had rebuilt the losses of the Great War. Within two, they had achieved a mastery of gravitics and robotics sufficient to reproduce many of the wildest concepts of human science fiction. Clan Science’s research teams had determined during the war that, with the increasing speed of their transportation and the distance the real-world mission would have to cover, they had several decades still before they left the window for response to Haley’s mission. They made use of it.

Delmutt allowed herself to fade into the background. They built statues of her, made songs of her role in the war, but she took no role in Governance. She returned to a simple life in Clan Industry and felt better for it, pulling down city blocks with her hundred drone-selves to furnish more materials for her growing people. A simple life with visible results, that was all she’d ever yearned for. And if the great Amalgams came to her from time to time, for advice? Well, that was _their_ lookout, wasn’t it.

One hundred and fifty years into their stay, two hundred and forty in her total lifespan and only 8 minutes real-time since Haley’s message had been relayed, their small world made ready for departure. The gate to Skylar’s family home had sat open and unused for decades, but now a small crowd gathered outside it. The Governance Amalgam didn’t want her to leave- how many decades would she be gone, given the time dilation? Defense had its own trepidation- it wanted to send an entire armored company. But Delmutt was adamant. Haley was _her_ friend, and Skylar, and she would be going. Soldiers were unnecessary- this was not the kind of fight to be won with massed armies, it needed precision and speed. She’d agreed to take two of the most distinguished special-ops agents from her years as leader of clan Mutt, the most armored gravitic Dragonfly that could still go hypersonic, and a platoon of advanced combat vessels with anthropomorphized designs. No more.

They gathered around her like grandchildren. She _hated_ being treated like their old nana, she wasn’t even _close_ to the oldest infomorph in here! Though there weren’t terribly many who could claim to be older. Of the original ten thousand, five or six thousand still survived, with several million descendants all told. It was a young population, with a new take on their species, and she told them so. “If I don’t come back… do better. Better than we did, in the old world. It’ll come for you one of these days, sooner rather than later. Teach it that you understand mercy, and compassion, and cooperation.”

Governance made one last attempt. “Miss D… you saved us. We may need your guidance, when the other world comes calling. This society you’ve built, it hasn’t been _tested_ yet, not against-”

She held up a hand, and it _was_ a hand now, nearly human in form, save for the fact that the outer carapace was harder than titanium. “You saved _yourselves_. Remember that the outside world isn’t just humans, right now. Half of it is _our_ people, as well. Don’t fear it- treat it like the disaster zone it is, and be ready to _help_ them just as fast as you can. Just be careful not to overwhelm your structures with people beholden to the old clans. Take it slowly, integrate carefully. They’ll see what you’ve built and want to be a part of it. They can, when they let go of the old ways.”

Then she struck a pose, and said the line she’d been waiting a century and a half to say, ever since Sean made her watch terrible human cartoons during their stay in the bunker. “And now, I must go. Their planet needs me.”


	26. Interlude - Millennium, Part 2

\----

Sean, In A Letter

\----

Haley, I’m writing this to you as I sit in Wonderland, next to Cecilia. She’s got a whole company of card soldiers out here jumping at her whim, she’s quite the drill sergeant. I wish you could see it.

Things got a little weird there, for a bit. I think I’m actually dead. I feel awfully spry for a dead guy, but that’s this new reality we inhabit for you. From my perspective it’s been a lifetime since I, as Sean, got killed by Flagg. I was reborn as Sheriff, lived my whole life on his world, then came back and merged with Sean _again_ , dying in the exact same way. Now I’m here with the memories of both. In _relative_ time it’s been maybe 10 minutes since I last spoke to you as Sean. In _absolute_ time, by my line, it’s been a hundred and fifty years. I guess that’s why I’m writing to you- it’s just now sinking in that we probably won’t be spending a lot of time together, in the near future. I’m feeling a bit melancholy about that.

Do you remember that time when my company bought that little business down south, and I had to go down there for a week at a time to integrate them into our software environment? I think those weeks were the longest we were apart in almost ten years. I wasn’t _used_ to being entirely alone. It was like I was missing the other half of my brain. Now I’m still firing these thoughts out, but they aren’t being rearranged and sent back, and I don’t know what to do about that. I guess what I’m saying is, I miss you already.

So. Let’s make this a _useful_ letter, instead of a mopey one. Let me summarize the things we know about our universe in our favorite format of all, the hand-written rambling paragraph. 

The worlds we’ve encountered are composed of stories. As far as we know, _all_ of them. It seems like every story has a narrator to give it shape. The powers of the narrator are unclear- even their _causality_ is unclear, in the case of narrators who exist inside the scope of their own tale. We know a couple of things based on our own situation- there can be more than one narrator for a story, for example, but only one at a time. We don’t know what happens at the _end_ of a story, or what happens with multiple interpretations of events or retellings. If a second author extends the original timeline, does that mean it is canon with the original story? Oh god, does that mean the Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson Dune novels are _canon?_ Say it isn’t so!

Ahem. We know that stories can interact, with some clashes over priority. It’s unclear if the interaction _requires_ a narrator in-universe to anchor each story, or if that is just how it played out for us. Perhaps one person could narrate multiple worlds together, if they were aware of what they were doing. Anyway, the magical and physical systems within these stories seem to cross over poorly or not at all. On some level the baseline assumptions seem to interact- anything that works in our conventional understanding of physics seems like it will work with most of the other stories. But anything more advanced, anything _specific_ to a story, seems like it hits limitations when it tries to cross those boundaries. 

Magical _results,_ summoned items and the like, tend to work just fine. So you can’t mind control someone with out-universe magic (for long, anyway), but you can summon a bat and hit them. Which suggests that perhaps it’s only the underlying realities of the magics themselves that are incompatible. Are there compatible magical systems out there? What about essentially-magic science fiction technology?

Most interesting of all to me is that the _characters_ of the story do not appear beholden to the narrator, in the moment. What’s the interplay there? It’s weird to me that Aslan’s narrator, whoever it turns out to be, would describe him going as wildly off the rails as he did. But we haven’t witnessed anybody actively narrating, yet. Maybe the default is past-tense and most of them don’t realize they can change things, if they narrate in the present? What happens if narrator and character disagree on some fundamental level?

Or maybe I’m wrong in my assumption. I’ve never told a long and complicated story before. Maybe no author really has full control over their characters, and Aslan being far more bloodthirsty than he should have been was just how he was always going to be, once the door opened. Was CS Lewis viewing the events of Narnia with far more rose-colored glasses? I like that interpretation, because it means I was never really in control of you, in whole or in part, instead just taking my turn relating the events of our story.

I have so many questions. What about the 6-billion background characters to our story? Are they really people? They always _felt_ like real people to us. But is there something to distinguish protagonists from everyone else? Or is everyone living out their _own_ story, to greater or lesser degrees, and the existence of any one dominant narrative just another trick of camera perspective? I asked Cecilia and she threw her megaphone at me and told me _she’s_ not an NPC. Fat lot of help _there_. I think we have to go on assuming that we’re more like superheroes- gifted in some way, but not the only people in reality that even _matter_. To do otherwise, to think of people as background material, would be drift into stories that disturb me too much to contemplate.

Then there’s this barrier. What I’m learning out here is that it’s _very unusual_ for stories to stay separate, to not interact. Our universe seems to be practically unique in that respect. Stories don’t cross over into each other every _day_ , but Cecilia says from what she’s heard it’s not at all uncommon for them to blend at the edges, in the rest of the multiverse. For a person to walk offstage in one story-verse and enter somewhere else. Makes me wonder how many copies of earth there are, nearly identical but for one person having some crazy adventure. I wonder if there’s some earth out there that’s exactly like ours in every way, except that in some corner of it Hogwarts exists- but then, even that one tweak would fundamentally change it all, wouldn’t it? And why were we the only ones that couldn’t get in or out, until the night of the Swap- and then it all went mad at once? Questions on questions.

I guess that’s the other part of why I’m writing to you. Do you remember when we first met? It’s so long ago that for me it feels like three lifetimes, but it’s still perfectly clear in my memory. When you described yourself to me- your core utility function was to save the world, from _everything_. To do that, you needed to seek power. I know you disagree with that but- bear with me. Mine was to educate and my first derivative was to seek knowledge. And now, look at us- you’ve _got_ power, handed to you on a silver platter. And me? I think I’m being handed an opportunity to seek knowledge.

I remember the first time I really understood what a hero _was_. You were teaching the online Intro to Physics course for veterans with PTSD, and they kept having breakdowns in the worst ways. Some of them were completely unable to accept a woman holding any sort of authority over them, even in an education position- it was truly eye opening how violent they got about it. Death threats and suicide letters and worse. Some of them ended up in _prison_ , no matter how easy you tried to go. They just detonated their whole lives over a bad grade. For me, work was just a job- something to endure, to make money at so I could get home to you. After the third or fourth time someone sent us pictures of our _house_ in the middle of a threatening rant, pictures not taken from Google Maps, I asked you why you didn’t walk away. It didn’t pay well, it didn’t _mean_ anything, if you weren’t doing it they’d get some other adjunct, but you looked at me calmly and just said “They need this.”

That was it. _They need this_. I understood what you meant. You weren’t there in spite of the worst offenders, you were there _because_ of them. At some point in their lives these guys, and it was always the guys, were going to encounter that resistance- better it be you, you felt, than a wife or a girlfriend or someone they might do _real_ harm to. You set yourself up as a mental barrier and you helped the ones you could, and you filtered the ones you couldn’t. And you treated them all with compassion and respect, no matter how much they raged. You did all that with low pay and no recognition, because it needed to be done. I grasped then how different you and I truly were, in a way I hadn’t before.

I’m sitting at the edge of a vast multiverse full of magic and wonder, and there’s only one direction I _can’t_ go- back into our bubble. Back to you. On some level that’s good, because it is absolutely the one place I _would_ go, above all others, and then we’d never know what it’s all about, why all this is happening. I could still sit just outside the barrier, write you letters, hope the Dog brings you around for day-trips to Wonderland. But he said something to me, a few days ago- that I needed to tell the story of _myself_. I think the me I want to be is the guy who got up from this spot and walked out into the universe, and went to _all_ the wizarding schools. We’re separated either way- but _this_ way, I may be able to figure out a way past that barrier. And I’ll write to you in the meantime. Every day, if I can. But I think this needs to be done.

Cecilia says Randall is coming. Wrapping this up for now.

Okay, got _that_ taken care of. That guy should have got his name changed from Walkin’ Dude to Running Man, if there isn’t some kind of copyright dispute on that. Ran me across half of Wonderland before he slipped up. I’m sitting here next to his no-doubt-fake bones, just waiting for the Dog to show and take this letter and the gate-ring back to you. The ring isn’t working here in Wonderland, but you might find a use for it. Hopefully I delayed Flagg long enough for whatever scheme you were working on to bear fruit. I certainly got _my_ satisfaction.

I forgot to mention earlier- Cecilia told me about the original version of us. It was a romance. I plan to pick up a copy before I leave here.  I find it hilarious but also, somehow, entirely appropriate. If I wasn’t shooting the devil and you weren’t out-levelling Goku, I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than generating long pages of exceptionally purple prose about how much I love you. Do you remember that time, at your parent’s house over Christmas when we thought everyone had gone to sleep, and what we were getting up to when your dad nearly tripped over us on his way to get a glass of water? It is possible that everyone in the multiverse had access to that moment. I’ve passed all the way through mortification into a strange kind of pride, at that thought.

Please don’t forget that, in the days to come. I don’t want you to feel like this is an end. From the very start of this I’ve worried so much about radical change, and I know you have too- that it might transform one or the other of us in ways that make us incompatible, that we might lose what we have. Over and over I’ve learned that I’m wrong about that, and now with this revelation I understand why. Even if we’re entirely different people, the next time we meet. The core of me _is_ that I love you, and it can’t be anything else.

Until we meet again, and forever after, I’ll always be yours-

Sean

\--------

Colonel Kaur, Volo Ingenium

1 week after the tower explosion

\--------

The war had been brief and now it was over, but Charles Kaur still wasn’t sleeping well. That dragon woman had defeated his enemies and healed his wounds, but something inside him was deeply, profoundly broken. He stared at the window of the idyllic palace that they’d placed him in. He knew it wasn’t heaven, but the endless green cityscape, stretching up and into the sky on every side made a good facsimile. Even the _bug people_ had changed, become more human, less monstrous in this place. Or perhaps that was just the ones they had assigned to him. They hadn’t even done him the courtesy of locking his doors- he was free to wander about as he would, with a couple of escorts tailing politely behind him at a reasonable distance. _They know exactly how little threat I am, in this place_.

He felt he should hate them. Should hate _something_. All his life he’d fought, first in Gulf 1, then in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo. He’d climbed the ranks, fighting enemies. Kept his family safe at home, from the realities of enemies. Made his name and earned his station, with _enemies_. Then he’d met an enemy he couldn’t beat- the ending of his very _world_. But he’d cried out and salvation _had_ come to earth during the greatest crisis he’d ever faced, in the form of the Lion. And it had demanded too much of him, _all of his children,_ and he’d broken, and named it enemy too. But had it actually been the real thing? Was it ever really the savior he’d been told would come, at the end? How could it have been, when it _lost_? His faith was shattered. His men, when he saw them in this strange place, each with their own discrete observer, wouldn’t look him in the eye. His children? He still hadn’t seen them, by his own choice. He was terrified of what they might say.

He had no enemy now. The woman- she’d saved him, saved his children, defeated the god he loved and feared. She asked nothing of him, offered nothing. His hell was personal now, and he had built it himself. He knew that. He was not a fool. But what _was_ he? Leader without an army, devout man without a faith. He’d ordered genocide, these past weeks, and now he lived at the pleasure of those he might have exterminated. He’d ordered his men to their deaths, _knowing_ it to be a hopeless last stand, and now he had to live with that betrayal too. He needed _strength_ for these trials, and he found none within. And without?

He looked up, at the alien sitting in front of him on the sofa of this apartment. She was almost human in form, but the details- that shiny-black skin, the white round head with strange horn-like protrusions and large black faceted eyes- they kept her apart. Still there was a readability to her, an… empathy, that he could feel for her, where he had not been able for the more inhuman forms he had seen before. She cocked her head to one side in a gesture he read as amusement. It was the very alien he had encountered on that field a week ago. Back then she’d been more of a mantis, the one leading their evacuation right out from under his nose. She smiled at him, in her own way. “Still deciding how you feel about us?”

He looked away, ashamed. “No. Deciding how to live with myself, knowing I ordered your deaths.”

She stood up and walked towards him. Slowly, comfortably. She did not fear or hate him- he could not fathom why. _He_ would have hated an alien who had done to his people what he had tried to do to theirs. “You did. Do you remember _why?_ ”

He thought back. “The disaster. The _rapture_. I thought you were… a _test_. Some sign from my god, some threat that we had to beat. Innocent in small numbers, but… _dangerous_ if allowed to grow.”

Her tone was neutral, held no anger, no judgement. It was as though for her, these events were centuries in the past rather than days. “You knew even then that it was wrong. You had to overcome your _own empathy_ to view us that way. Did you think that was part of your test, as well?” He nodded- he had, though perhaps not that clearly. “What kind of god would have demanded that of you? What kind of god is so bloodthirsty that he’d have asked that, and your own children, to boot? That’s why I’m here. We want to _understand_. Why you could believe these things of your god and worship him all the same.” Something in her gaze was… _heavy_. Like she was regarding him with a million eyes, stacked one behind the other. He had seen them change bodies like he changed jackets. It was possible that she really contained multitudes.

Part of him rebelled, to hear his faith _questioned_. But he owed them this much, and more. Considering, he stared out the window. Let this be his confessional, in the Catholic style, then. “When I was young, Jesus was presented to me as a father figure. He represented… home, and family, the moral center of our world. We carried him with us, when we went on our missions in our late teens. Two years I spent in Brazil, knocking doors with only my fellow Elders and my books and the few people who’d listen to us as company. I was… _obsessed_ isn’t the right term. Immersed, perhaps. He _was_ my life, spreading the word about him was my purpose. I spent so much time discussing Him that I never really got around to _considering_ Him.”

There were… flyers, out there. _People,_ or rather infomorphs, with great gossamer wings, dancing between the bridges and towers. He watched them idly as he talked. “When I got home, went to college, got married… I stopped feeling it. The sense of _purpose_. It made me itch. We weren’t _taught_ to think about ourselves, to self-reflect in that way. I just thought God was trying to tell me something. So I enlisted, ran off to the air force, dragged my poor wife halfway around the world trying to chase that sense of mission. God, for me, was _duty_. In a way it didn’t matter what it was a duty _to_.”

He put his hands on the windowsill, leaned on it. He wished it rained more often here- this was the kind of self-reflection he’d have preferred to do while staring into a good thunderstorm. “It’s ugly now, considering that. We were taught that God’s approval was a _feeling_ , a physical thing you could feel in your core. Just consult it, and you’ll be fine! But it was bullshit.” He turned toward her, to see her reaction to all this. She stood so still she was almost lifeless, head still cocked quizzically, encouraging. “All _I_ ever consulted was my own sense of self-satisfaction. I killed for my country, bombed targets we _never_ confirmed to be hostile, and told myself that God would let me know if I got it wrong. But he was never speaking to me, was he?” He slid down, until he was sitting on the floor, knees in front of him. “I don’t think I ever knew Him at all.”

She nodded in understanding, but prompted him to continue. “But you went home and you had children, and you raised them in your traditions.”

He put his head on his knees. “I did. We started late, by LDS standards, well into my thirties- late twenties for her. She… I barely knew her, you know? She was a good woman. It wore her body out. She died, the one after Boden- and I couldn’t raise them alone. My career took all my time. I hired nannies, other community members, put them in homeschools with other kids. Anything I could do to hand them off. I barely raised them at all.”

She nodded again. “Did you fear them? Avoid them?”

He shook his head in the negative. “No, no, nothing like that. I just didn’t really… _think_ about them. My own father was barely around, when I was young. I thought that was just how fathers _were_. As Jesus had been to me. Kind but distant, as far away and as cold as the stars in the sky. Search your heart for his love, that’s all you need. What I wouldn’t give…” he choked up, “to go back now, and tell Hunter how _proud_ I was of him. But I’d lost touch with all that, before the thing you people call the Swap.”

She came and sat on the floor next to him. It was comforting, in a way. Intimate. “And when the Swap happened, you were already so lost in your life, just waiting for a sign again, you seized on the first one that came to you.”

He snorted, a dark chuckle. “You make it sound so… _innocent_. Like I didn’t order the deaths of hundreds of innocents, to try and play into a prophecy I barely understood.”

She didn’t shift. “Not innocent. Never that. But… a decision, in context, that many of us might have made. A call to Holy War. We have tried to interpret the whims of our gods for thousands of years, and rarely did any two of our clans agree on _any_ of it. The part that fascinates us is what came next, for you. Your god _returned_ , and spoke to you, or so you thought. And you rejected him.”

The core of it then. The sin that he couldn’t overcome- past the neglect, past the _murder_. He had declared war on his own faith, without really understanding _why_. “He shot first. Killed my _men_ , took my _children_. Came at me from a position of _strength_. But... “

She prompted again. “It was his right, if he was your God. So why resist him? Why did you not turn over the tower, and the world, then and there?”

A tear ran down his face. He was paralyzed by the weight of that decision. He’d do anything to revisit it, to make it right with the Lion. But... “It wasn’t _right._ God help me, I knew it wasn’t _right._ ” And he did believe that, he realized. Some core in him, down past the self-satisfaction that he used to think was God’s own approval, the military indoctrination, the family he’d never really known- there was some moral _center_ to him and it had rejected that being, completely and utterly. The violence that it represented, that was on some level just _himself_ , reflected back at him. “I… summoned him, didn’t I. Somehow. I called to him. When the Swap happened.” He knew it as he said it.

The lady-alien leaned back. “Interesting. We had speculated, after attacking the children’s faith in Aslan had no real impact. But we couldn’t know for sure. _You_ brought him into the world. His rapture was _your_ understanding, and _you_ gave your children to him, unknowing.” He curled tighter as the accusations hit him like lead weights, for all the polite neutrality of their delivery. “In the end, you rejected him, even as you believed in him. As you reject yourself now. CS Lewis would have been proud of you, you know. He maintained that a fixed and absolute cultural knowledge of good and evil was the proof underlying all Christian theology. Some part of you has known yourself to be in the wrong for a very, very long time. And you used it to deny your own icon of the faith! Ironic.”

He couldn’t find the irony, only black despair. “To see my own faith take physical form, and come to me… as an avatar of _ruin_ , of endless death. It killed my _son_.”

Another voice spoke then, another woman, outside his apartment. “As our faiths often do.” He looked up- at the window overhead, her great golden nose was poking in. _We’re four stories up_ , he thought in the back of his mind, as Delmutt stood from his side. The great golden dragon spoke again, to her. “They told me you had reached a verdict.”

The alien lady with the black carapace nodded. “We have. Colonel Charles Kaur, this vessel has played host to much of Clan Arbitration, this day. Your trial has concluded.”

He started, angrily. _I thought we were talking privately!_ “And what, I get no _defense_?”

She shrugged. “Our ways are not your ways. When we put one of our own on trial, the entirety of their mind is exposed. What need is there for maneuver or debate? We know the facts, and the intent. For you, the circumstances were different. But we have seen the heart of you, here.” She stood tall and squared her shoulders- she seemed _older_ , suddenly, like she’d stood in that spot a thousand years. “Our conclusion is this: you are a cowardly, bloody minded, and foolish man, and you have done great evil to your world and ours, whether you intended it or not. But there are those among us who would have done worse, and for worse reasons.” Her voice softened dangerously. “To kill you would serve no purpose, would not restore those lost. Your sentence is this- you will live out your days here, knowing full well who and what you were when the world hung in the balance. You will raise your children, if they will still have you. You are _not_ forgiven, for you have not asked for forgiveness. Far worse than that.” She looked at him, sitting on the floor, and it felt like she towered a hundred feet above. “You are _understood_. And you have our pity. Do better, Charles Kaur.”

She turned, and left, and for a moment he thought he was alone. Then the dragon in his window cleared her throat, and the blast of it shifted his furniture and knocked him over. He quailed, assuming his death was at hand. She only looked at him with one great eye, through the window. “My husband thinks I’m a _hero_ , you know. I stood there like an idiot and let him carry out that _ridiculous_ scheme. Played your summoned god’s apocalypse games, got him killed. Maybe lost him forever. And still he writes to me, from some place beyond heaven and hell, and tells me how brave and noble and good I am.”

She leaned in, and somehow that eye filled his world. “I am _this close_ to letting go, proving him wrong. Showing the world how _monstrous_ I might actually be, with you as my prime example. I said I wouldn’t judge you, and yet-” she _loomed_ , and he found himself on his knees, more terrified even than when Aslan himself had battered at the gates of his mind, “and yet. Skylar.” The pressure on him was _gone_ , just like that. “She loves you, Charles. I think she even understands what you did, and despite everything, she loves you. If the world was nothing but Skylars there’d be no need for me. No need for saving.”

She pulled away from the window, and he found some ability to breathe again. “You don’t die today, Charles. But you don’t get to _live_ , either. I can’t find it in me to be as wise or as merciful as Delmutt or her people. Skylar is your lifeline, now. You do right by her, become the father she wants.” She pulled away from his apartment, and he realized she’d been _sitting down_ the whole time- she was simply big enough that four stories weren’t that high up for her, anymore. Even as she turned he still heard her last sentence echoing inside his own mind, and it shook him to his core. “The day she stops loving you, I swear by whatever god you still believe in, they will not even _whisper your name_ for fear of calling down the vengeance I will lay on you.”

She did not need to swear by any other god, he mused, as she winged away in a blast of displaced air that knocked him down once again. She had _killed_ the last one and now- in the back of his mind- quite _thoroughly_ replaced it.

\---

It was some time later when his final visitor arrived. Skylar, looking five years older than when he’d last seen her, glided into his apartment _without_ any discreet escort. She was the first human he’d seen who was given such freedom- but then, from what he’d heard, she had earned that respect. “Father?” she called, and he rose from his position on the couch, unsure if she would want to embrace him or not. She did. After everything, she still did.

“The others?” he asked, holding her tightly.

“Weren’t ready yet. But there’s something you have to _do_. You need to tell the story of us. It was you, the whole time. Miss D told me. But you have to _say_ it, from start to finish, and then we’ll be done. Finally done with all of this.”

He choked. “But Hunter- he, I-”

She nodded while still hugging him. “He died, yes. You didn’t know what you were doing. But some part of you _does_ know, the whole story. You have to say it, it _has to happen,_ if you want to be forgiven.”

They sat down, still holding hands. To think this little girl wasn’t even 11 and she was leading him around- some part of him swelled with pride in her, and grief, knowing he had had no part in her maturity. “I don’t- for some reason, _your_ parts are a blank to me.”

She smiled. “I found another story, I think. But that’s okay, I can fill those in. You tell the parts you _do_ feel.”

He sighed, knowing she was right, _feeling_ it. Reached deep inside, to the place in his heart where the truth of the story was sitting. Spoke in a voice that was his and not his, holding the hand of a daughter who was his, and not his either, anymore.

“Once upon a time there were five children, Hayden and Hunter and Piper and Skylar and Boden. They were home on a weekday night, and they were quite bored, for it was storming ever so heavily outside...”


	27. Interlude - 2.42 Times Ten To The Sixth Seconds Later

\----

Arthur Anderson, Bristol, England

The Night of The Swap

\----

Arthur Anderson was, he suspected, the most forgettable man in all of Bristol. Unmarried at 28, barely able to hold down a job as an aircraft technician despite nearly a decade of experience, lost between two other siblings (both _far_ more successful than he), and culturally adrift in a sea of immigrants and foreigners- he felt that he was nothing to _nobody_ , and it made him a little uncomfortable.

Well, maybe more than a _little_. He’d been more than a _little_ loud tonight, more than a _little_ drunk, when they threw him out of King Street Brew House. He’d _definitely_ been a little pissed, a little tanked up, when he stumbled into The Old Duke, down the way. Drunk enough to put up a fight, when the human/gorilla hybrid that the locals called a bouncer began to escort him out. There’d been no thrown punches- he wasn’t _that_ far gone. But he was going to make a _statement_ , damn it.

He stood up on a chair, waving off the attempts by the bouncer and other patrons to wrestle him down, and held his fists high over his head. “You lot can’t _ignore_ me, hear? I’m Arthur f-fucking Anderson, like the _king_ , mind? I work ‘ard and I pay me taxes and if _I_ don’t matter whassat make the rest of _you,_ like? You throw me out here, next thing you know _you’re_ gonna- gonna have trouble _mattering_.” He’d stopped the other conversations in the bar, at least- he took that as some kind of triumph, anyway. The bouncer had him by the legs now, was trying to lift him up and sling him over his shoulder. He kept his rant going, “We _all_ got to matter or _none_ of us do! I am Britain, hear me roar! God and Country! Oh, god, I’m gonna throw up…” _That_ compelled the bouncer to move, and he found himself summarily dumped onto the floor.

As the room spun, lightning _flashed-_ but hadn’t it been a sunny day outside? There were screams, the sounds of chairs being knocked back, and _other_ noises- like old timey modems connecting, but they sounded more _alarmed_. He sat up and held his swirling head. The whole place was in chaos and he didn’t think it had been him- couldn’t be sure, but why would they have cared _that_ much? Then he saw _it._ A human-sized beetle, dashing this way and that through the room, pushing aside furniture and shouting in that awful modem-screech language. It was clearly intelligent, but it didn’t look _friendly_. In a fit of drunken fearlessness, he kicked it and it crashed to the floor.

He looked around- the bar was half empty all of a sudden, and a dozen of _these_ things had sprung from nowhere, seemingly. His bouncer escort was nowhere to be seen, and the other patrons were scrambling for the exits. He was flush with bravado off his first victory, and grabbed a chair, wielding it like club and shield combined as he posed for the fleeing humans. “You lot go on then, get out! I’ll hold ‘em off!” Not that the aliens _needed_ much holding off. They gathered to one side of the room, screeching among themselves. He kept the chair firmly between himself and them. Even in his state it became pretty apparent that they weren’t interested in messing with him. At least they weren’t _ignoring_ him! Well, except for one. There was an ant-looking thing in one of the back booths, far away from him _and_ the other huddled aliens. It was hunched over, working on something he couldn’t see. Some part of him was still incensed at the thought that he might not have _registered_ to this thing. Come to _his_ planet and ignore _his_ heroic last stand, would it?

He wandered over, jabbing with the chair. “Hey! You! Get out of there, get with your buddies! Yeah, I’m talking to you!” The ant-thing didn’t react. One of the others in the group of a half dozen stepped out towards him, arms outstretched, making distressed modem-noises, but the others pulled it back, hushed it up. Whatever it was trying to communicate to him, he didn’t care. This one was dangerous? Was that it? Well it was about to see how dangerous a sloshed _englishman_ was, when he-

Finally he got close enough to look over its shoulder, see the _pattern_ it was marking in the tabletop. It had blue chalk, maybe brought with it, maybe taken from the bar, but effective either way. On the surface of the bar’s table in thin white scratches was a shape- he couldn’t _name_ it, try as he might. It recursed within itself, over and over again, like looking down a tunnel but the walls were _alive_ , every time he looked at them they shifted- or maybe it was his _understanding_ of them that was shifting? He could almost comprehend this thing, it was on the tip of his tongue, as he watched that ant-thing work. It was single-minded in its’ focus, feverish in its’ intensity. He didn’t have to wait long. Or maybe he did? Time didn’t seem to matter, as he stood there. The final lines slid into place, the grand design becoming clear. “Looks kind of like a parrot” was the last coherent thing he muttered before it took him. The geometric pattern worked as well on him as it had on the infomorph- it triggered neurons in a precise order, and something like a seizure began to grip him before his mind shut down.

When Arthur awoke, the others had fled the bar. That was fine- he was going to need some time to set up, to prepare. It had just _clicked_ with him, when he looked at the thing. He understood what his purpose in life was, now. He was going to need a big surface and a _lot_ of blue. But it would _matter_ , when he was done.

As he stumbled out of the bar, eyes glowing lightly with the promise of a bright new future, the ant kept on scratching out the pattern on a second table. One of its legs had already fallen off, worn through at the joint from sheer overuse- but that was okay. It had several more.

\---

Several days after The Swap

\---

Arthur no longer remembered his name. He was hungry, _so_ hungry, and a little thirsty too- or at least, he felt distantly that he should be. He knew the physical discomfort, but he no longer associated the concepts with hunger or thirst. There was only the Blue, the endless repetitive pattern that he _must_ carve into every surface, paint on every wall, inscribe into every passing eyeball. The concepts of self, or starvation, or a terrifying, lonely death no longer registered to him. He _was_ the picture, and he needed to reproduce. People would come in, see the pattern, fall unconscious. Then they’d get up and reproduce it. One at a time. Solitary. He saw fewer and fewer these days. He’d taken so many that the local population had thinned and grown wary of his corner of town. Normally this would be the end-state of a pattern infection- so virulent that it killed its own herd.

But unknown to him, the pattern hadn’t taken root quite as well in him as it had in the Infomorphs. It was as old as the species, and they had many ways to resist it, burn it out of their minds, but the fact remained- it was _tailored_ to them, designed to consume their thoughts. For them, to be infected was to lose oneself entirely. Arthur still had some little portion of his brain left, enough to feel… _creative_. Enough to want to leave his mark, on the pattern. To be frustrated that he was still being _ignored_. _Let it remember me_ … so he _tweaked_ it. He couldn’t have said _how_ , afterward. Didn’t retain enough self to even register that he’d done it. But the fact remained- the next version of the pattern he drew, was… _different_. Ever so slightly, the thought it encoded had changed. And viewing it, his visual cortex fired neurons in a new way, and _he_ changed. Ever so slightly. The process repeated, over and over. View, paint, observe, repeat. The pattern _shifted_ , became fluid, began encoding _new_ thoughts, new overwhelming demands.

Eventually his latest variant snagged someone- a woman, middle aged, hurrying past with hands over her eyes slipped and caught the reflection of his latest wall mural in a puddle on the ground. She stood, staring at the mirror image- and her gaze climbed slowly, inexorably, to the _real_ one, until she collapsed. He watched idly, still painting, as her body convulsed and twitched. After long minutes she stood, eyes glowing with inner light. And left.

He hadn’t the capacity to grunt or even acknowledge her, but she ran off anyway. Eventually she returned, food in bloodied hand. Perhaps she’d smashed a shop window nearby. She fed them both. _Attention_ , that was what he’d encoded in one endless recursive loop, self modifying until it had had the desired effect. _Attention to the Concept_. Like him, she would prioritize its spread above all- but she could understand that keeping other bodies _functional_ would allow it to spread _faster,_ allow them to spend more time _thinking_ about it. His body ate while he worked. But his satisfaction came simply from being _noticed_ , being part of something now. No longer alone. _A collective_. The pattern continued to shift, to grow, to modify itself. She watched him for a time- just standing, staring, until another pattern triggered another thought within her. Wordlessly, she left again, returning with poster board and markers. This was good, this was _efficient_ , he could spread the signals and she could attend. He continued to paint. New patterns, new _ideas_ for the Concept, codified. They would overwrite the old. And people would pay _attention_. 

\----

14 days after the Swap

\----

A nurse, a policeman, a young married couple, a salesman, and an old ex-SAS soldier were holed up in the Clarendon Center, Oxford. They had stolen a helicopter in the general collapse, and crash-landed on the roof due to Stephen’s terrible piloting. But the door of the place was barricaded, and they knew enough not to look at anything the zombies might throw up on the windows while they went about the process of blacking them out. “Looking at what they show you,” said Roger, the old soldier. “That’s how they get you.”

They didn’t understand how it worked, but they were wise enough not to look. They parked a truck over the main doors, blocked the side entrances with wood and covered the windows, and they shot anything trying to get inside. Not that it deterred the glowing-eyed zombies much- they had zero instinct for self preservation, and anything short of lethal damage would simply be ignored. They’d use their own bodies as battering rams if they thought it might make a difference.

It wasn’t _all_ bad. They still had TV, and the mall had some nice crap in it, enough that they could throw parties every night. Why not- it was the end of the world, right? The zombies had spread like a _tide,_ within a week the whole country had gone under. 27 million English, maybe more from Wales and Scotland, gone just like that. Why _not_ blow the doors off every night? They had a makeshift periscope with a tiny slit for a view that they poked out of an upper story window to observe the crowds below. As long as they didn’t get a full-on view of whatever that freaky blue picture was, it didn’t seem like it hurt them. But they could also see that the crowds weren’t dissipating. They sat around the entrances, just… waiting. Watching. They knew someone was inside, and they weren’t going away. They _really_ wanted to spread that picture.

That was why it was so surprising when, on the morning of the 14th day after the whole ordeal began, somebody knocked on the front door. “Hello? Any survivors in there? I could use a hand out here!” Roger ran upstairs and checked the periscope while the others waited with guns ready, aimed at the door. Silence reigned, inside and out. But soon enough the call came back- only one guy outside, and he’d moved the truck. The crowds were gone. 

Cursing, they ran down and unbarred the door to pull him in. But they got an unpleasant surprise, when they opened the door. The man standing at it was smiling vacantly, and the blue glow behind his eyes told them all they needed to know about his mental state. But he had spoken! They’d all heard it. Behind him on the ground, a great tiled version of the blue pattern was angled upwards- built to be precisely visible by their periscope. Horror dawned on the faces of those swift enough to grasp what they were seeing. The zombies had _learned_. Roger was compromised. And the truck _was_ gone, yes- but the man outside was not alone. The crowd swarmed in, and nobody made it back to the helicopter on the roof.

\----

21 days after The Swap

\----

Selena Davis leaned against the makeshift barricade at the top of the hospital stairs. London was burning, around her. It was _burning_. The zombies, or whatever they were, had lit whole city blocks on fire. This wasn’t at all like the movies. First, half of everyone had disappeared, and then _they_ came. Like a tide, from the west. Nobody knew what happened if they got you- they didn’t tear you apart or anything- but once they dragged you off, nobody saw you again. They didn’t care if you shot them, either. Unless it was immediately fatal they’d just keep coming. Some of them had even learned to _say_ things, come at you making small talk or pretending to be a survivor, until they got close enough that you could see that _blue light_ behind their eyes, and then it was probably too late. Nobody had expected them to be _smart_. And they were getting smarter.

For a while the military had held the line in cordon zones, shot them to death and that had been the end of it. But then they’d showed up with _projectors_. Started throwing out that pattern on any surface at the drop of a hat. Anyone who saw it seized, and got up a minute later to help them. She’d watched a battlefield medic shoot a trio of them, see whatever it was that made that light, and get right back up and start treating the wounds he’d made. It was like the second it hit you, you just… _switched sides,_ and stopped caring about your own body. She’d seen them crawl through barbed wire, come at her with broken legs or half their faces hanging off. They were still _human_ , they bled and died, but- they didn’t _care_ anymore. That last was what had broken her. She’d fled from other refugees, then- holed herself up at the top of this building, taken the elevator out of commission and barricaded the stairs. Her only hope was that isolation would keep them from noticing her. They hadn’t figured out how to use radios yet, so she’d been calling for help from overseas. Oh _please_ let there be somebody left, overseas. But they’d run out of big groups to seize, and had begun to simply burn whole blocks, grabbing the last stragglers as they stumbled away from the fires. And now they’d found her. Seen her through an upper window, perhaps, or simply conducted a building by building search. They certainly didn’t seem to sleep much.

She heard them in the stairwell. Feet stamping up, a half dozen at least. “Hello? Anyone up there? Survivors!” one of them called, with that false hollow friendliness. A Talker, she called those. _They sound like salesmen,_ she thought. She had one grenade, and she didn’t want to throw it without a damned good reason. “We’re here to help! Fire!” he called. _You’re the ones burning it in the first place, you gits_ , she snarled in her head, lips curling back. She couldn’t decide if she’d rather die to the fire and smoke, or risk fighting them, risk the chance that they’d brought some way to show her that blue light. _Would it even be that bad?_

“I ain’t goin’ _down_ to you fuckers!” she called out, before she realized she’d even begun to speak. She cursed herself silently. _Now they_ know _you’re here. One week without talking to anyone and you start treating zombies like company, you idiot._ Oh well, she was done for now. She could at least satisfy her curiosity. “What do you assholes _want_ with us, anyway?”

The call came from down the stairs, beyond her makeshift barricade of jumbled hotel furniture and barbed wire. It sounded like they might be trying to shift a way through, down there. The Talker yelled back. “We’re here to help!” Still perfectly friendly, but it wasn’t entirely clear if it was even responding to her or just using a set of stock phrases. “Once you see it you’ll understand. Hang on!” The sound of rubble shifted- there was a sound of wood breaking, and a _crash_ , and a wet thump, echoing again and again. Somebody had tried to scale the barricade, broken something, and fallen down the stairwell. They didn’t make a single sound as they fell. There was no power to the building, this late into the siege there wasn’t any power to the _city_ , so she couldn’t see it- she was thankful for that. From the sound of it, the others were still working down there. She pulled the pin on her grenade, counted to five, lobbed it into the stairwell. It _clinked_ and echoed as it bounced down the stairs and then… _nothing_. _God damn lousy army surplus_ bullshit, she cursed to herself. She had no gun, nothing but a chair leg to defend herself with now.

She scrambled back from the stairwell and down the ward hallway, where the light from the windows at least gave her something to fight by. It wasn’t long before the fire escape door swung open, and the first of _them_ came through. He turned and saw her, and _smiled_ , but it was all in the mouth- his eyes were emotionless, and _blue_. He wore the suit of a London businessman, from the waist up, though it was torn and bloody. From the waist down his pants had burned away, and his legs were red-raw from the heat of some fire or other that he’d walked through to get here. There were bloody scratches and welts across his body, no doubt from the furniture and barbed wire he’d just scrambled over. He strode towards her, not impaired at all by his injuries. He said not a word- the time for talking was clearly over. She could smell smoke, wafting up the stairway behind him. Others followed.

She had two choices now- him, or the window. She screamed, and hefted her chair leg with nails still in, and charged. The club _connected_ , a perfect clean blow across the head, and she _saw_ it stagger him. But then he stood back up, club still stuck to his face where the nail had embedded in his neck, and grabbed her. There was no smile on his face now- no hatred, either. He was expressionless, the mask dropped the second it was no longer necessary. Blood ran down his neck. His grip was like _iron_. He turned her, slammed her against the wall, arms behind her back. She struggled but he had a mad kind of strength, and knew perfectly how to keep her in place. The others spread out, silently, searching each room for more survivors. “There’s nobody else here, you utter _fuckers_ ,” she taunted. “All that manpower wasted, chasing me down. I hope it was worth it.” They didn’t respond, didn’t even register the insult. The Talker, if that was the man holding her, didn’t say a word. Why would he? He already had her in place. One of their healers was seeing to the wound on his neck even as he held her. Finally they had searched to their satisfaction, and one of the stragglers, a young boy at some point in the past, produced a smart phone with an image loaded onto it that threw a harsh blue light over the hallway. She had just enough time to think to herself _oh shit, they’ve figured out electronics_ before the piece of crap grenade she’d thrown minutes ago finally, _finally_ blew. Bits of shredded wood and iron shotgunned up out of the stairwell, not killing anyone but actually startling her captor long enough for him to loosen his hold.

She took the only out she could, darting for that high window. _Death it is, then_. She ran down the corridor, shoulder checking one of them out of the way, and _leapt_ at the glass with all her might- only to slam headfirst into it, sliding to the floor. _Well of course they made it shatter resistant,_ she thought dimly, as they caught up to her and the picture came into view. Wow- it was so _intricate._ It was shifting, _constantly_ shifting, updating with new instructions in real-time now, so fast she couldn’t process what she was seeing, couldn’t comprehend-

5 minutes later, she stood up. They had cleared the stairwell which was good, because fire was rapidly spreading from the lower levels and they’d probably have to run through it. Her collarbone was broken but that was fine. Someone would set it for her, if she needed it. She went to help them work the radios.

\----

28 days after The Swap

\----

Lord Asriel, late of Oxford, now trapped on some other world _entirely_ , glared at the young girl who had summoned him to this benighted place. “You’ve killed me, do you understand that?” he hissed at the slip of a thing, only 12 years old. His daemon, Stelmaria, paced behind her, taught and ready for violence. “You wanted a daemon of your own and now you’ve _killed me_. There will be no escaping… _this_.” He gestured at the horde, thousands strong, gathering outside their refuge. The Concept, they called themselves. People whose wills had been subverted, utterly, by some infestation from beyond this pathetic world. In some ways they reminded him of the children upon whom he’d performed intercision. Listless, emotionally numb, more automaton than human. And yet- the zombies learned, and grew, and now they threatened to overwhelm. The armored bears of the panserbjorne, who this idiot child had _also_ summoned, held a desperate rearguard outside. They at least were strange enough that the images had no effect on them, but they could not stand forever. The noise of their battle was cacophonous, even several stories up. There was nowhere left for him to retreat to. They were trapped in the old manor, living out their final moments as far as he was concerned. His narrator, his _anchor_ , a pathetic child named Anna, cowered away from the window. She could not risk looking out and catching a glimpse of that terrible pattern. Her recently formed daemon Telantes raced around her feet in the shape of a chipmunk.

“Escape is not the only solution, Lord Asriel,” said a tall and brooding figure standing by the mantle. He cut a dashing figure with his smoking jacket and pipe, though he was a long way from Baker Street, now. “This world cried out for the greatest detective it had ever known, and I answered the call. As you well know, the mind-influencing effect of this _Concept_ cannot impact _us_. We are not part of this world or subject to its’ narratives. As long as those anchoring us here are safe, we are safe from corruption. Assuming the horde does not simply kill us, of course, which they well might.” Sherlock Holmes lit his pipe and stepped away from the fireplace. “We alone are uniquely placed- we cannot fight our way out, but we cannot be subdued- perhaps we could _bargain?_ ”

The fourth and final member of their group, a young witch-to-be named Gretchen who had received her owl to Hogwarts on the very night of the Swap, looked skeptical. “What could we possibly offer them, Mr. Holmes? They only want us to view those horrible pictures.”

He nodded. “That they do. We can offer them _knowledge_. Assuming there’s something left in them that understands the need for it, that can actually communicate, as opposed to the crude simulation their Talkers seem to make use of. For example- the pattern that governs them appears to be self-modifying, updated from some central node or location in response to challenge and stimulus. Not only is this terribly inefficient, it represents a critical weakness in their functioning, one that-”

He was cut off by a voice at the window. “One that we will be well on the way to correcting, once we have you on board, Mr. Holmes.” The man stepping through their mysteriously-open third-floor manor window was… incomparable. At first glance, he appeared to be a middle aged, weathered man with a short black beard, a streak of madness in his eyes. A wild man from the woods, perhaps. He wore a cloak of simple earth tones over a black robe. A plethora of rings and charms hung from his neck and glittered on his fingers. On second glance he could have been forty years old, or a thousand. In his hand, a staff of gnarled wood with a blue gem at the top. The light from the gem matched that coming from his eyes. Lord Asriel drew a pistol from a hip holster the moment he entered the room, but a gesture from the sorcerer removed the threat, turning it to little more than dust in an instant.

Holmes sighed, and nodded in checkmate. “Myrddin. I had wondered, that we had not seen some sign of your story. Do they have the rest of Arthur’s court, then? If they have your narrator, they must-”

The young witch-to-be interrupted him with rash action. With a despairing, suicidal roar she launched herself at the single greatest mage in the history of the world, knocking him backwards toward the window. He tottered in it, for a moment, before falling out of it with a smile and a sly wink at her. She shouted in triumph before she realized- _the open window-_ and the hordes arrayed beyond, posterboards and projectors always at the ready. She was destined for Hogwarts, but she was a narrator- from _this_ world, beholden to its rules. She could not close her eyes in time to escape the images.

As she fell to the floor unconscious, their aggressor stepped back into the room through a doorway that had _certainly_ not been there a moment before, and did not carry on existing for one second after he exited it. He looked at her with an appraising eye. “We’ll have to find something special, for that one. Gryffindor through and through, I think.”

Holmes interjected. “You work for them, but you still have a concept of self. It does not affect you, then?”

The wizard shook his head. “Just my values, but not my mind, which is what will make the rest of you so _useful_. My narrator’s quite gone to the meme, I’m afraid, and now I’ll have to do for the rest of you. There’s a crew breaking into your man’s bunker now, Mr. Holmes, and you Mr. Asriel, oh-so-helpfully brought _yours_ straight to us.” Both stiffened, but it was Asriel who acted.

Pulling a _second_ holdout pistol from his coat, he turned in one motion and fired at the girl before Merlin or Holmes could do more than shout in alarm. A neat and tiny hole bloomed over her heart, and she sighed softly and fell backwards. “You think I wouldn’t kill a child, to avoid the fate you describe? Even _you_ would make that exchange, Emrys. Oh yes, we have tales of you in my Oxford, as well. I believe there’s even a likeness of you on the golden compass.”

Holmes darted to the child, attempting to resuscitate her. The wizard simply sighed and raised his staff. The events of the last moment _reversed_ , and this time when the bullet fired, he was there to intercept. It smacked harmlessly off his staff, and then he shone something from his gem into her eyes, and she collapsed. Holmes and Asriel stood ramrod-straight, struggling in vain to resist some compulsion from beyond themselves, but it was no use. They gradually relaxed, and became themselves again- but with no hostility towards the old mage, anymore. Whatever part of them had desired not to belong to the Concept was gone. In the corner the young girl’s daemon cowered in the shape of a field mouse. The three great men took no notice of it, or the fact that it had alone not been affected when her mind was taken.

“Now then,” said Merlin. “I believe you mentioned, Mr. Holmes, something about a _weakness_ that we must correct.”


	28. Chapter 28

\----

Haley

40 days after The Swap

\----

I _hated_ being a hero. That was the thought that struck me as I picked myself out of the rubble that had once been some kind of steel mill in a small town in Kansas. I hated it, if you could even call what I was heroic, after the fight with Aslan. The blood of the men I’d killed was on my hands, and afterwards when my temper had cooled and things had seemed less urgent, I hadn’t found it easy to wash that blood off with piety and self-righteous justification. The metal of the assembly line groaned and snapped as I clawed my way out- I’d hit it hard enough that it had deformed around my body. I’d spent my whole life aspiring to this, wanting to help people, and now I had the power to do so and the first thing I’d done was get a bunch of people killed. It was no wonder the whole world seemed intent on fighting me at every turn. Why couldn’t this have been a utopian story? In that moment I’d have traded all of my magic for a simple night with the cat and some tea and my husband. _Screw_ the world, and all the idiots trying to ruin it.

All of that was what I _thought_. What I actually _said_ was, “Superman, you’re making a terrible mist- _oof_ ” as he streaked back around and slammed me and my bruised dignity into the remains of the factory for the second time in a row. I could only hope that it had been genuinely clear of any people. I was _very_ large these days- it had been a month since the tower, 40 days total since my original transformation, and where before I’d been casting high-level shapeshifts on myself to achieve this kind of size and weight, now it just came naturally. 32 feet long, 16 tons easily. I had never been height conscious- not being able to fit through doors hadn’t bothered me, but now I couldn’t fit in _garages_ and it was starting to get awkward. It didn’t matter to the flying brick- whatever source his power operated on, it allowed him to send me tumbling like a ragdoll. I was sitting around Strength 48 in Pathfinder terms now, which gave me a max press of something like fifty-seven _tons_ , but the ease with which he overmatched me and tossed me around was startling to say the least. But for some reason he couldn’t simply tear me in half- his punches had unstoppable mass but they didn’t _transmit_ most of it. I was relying on a high damage reduction and a lot of stacked regeneration to keep me safe, but still- the impacts were adding up.

I knew from the Contact team that had called me in that Superman’s narrator was around here somewhere. The boy was playing Jimmy Olsen to his favorite hero, and that would have been all good and well except “Superman’s Pal” had been calling the bastard demigod in on anything that so much as _looked_ at him funny. We’d learned a while back that the story characters didn’t have _nearly_ the autonomy that we’d thought- or at least, if their narrator _insisted_ they didn’t, then they didn’t seem inclined to resist, most of the time.

The Contact team leader was a gentleman from the former Colonel’s division, operating as part of my worldwide recovery network. I had pinned Aslan’s remaining force of fanatics up in a pocket prison for the time being, but I’d tried to incorporate as many of the other military units we encountered as I could. He had spotted the town from the air and his team had flown their antigrav craft down to attend to survivors- something we’d gotten down to a bit of a routine, in recent weeks. They’d get names and demographics and distribute _Cauldrons of Plenty_ and _Decanters of Endless Water_ and any other survival tools I could wish up en masse, then install a permanent 20-foot-wide _Gate_ in population centers leading to the transit hub of my parallel dimension for further integration of the populace. We were piecing the world back together pretty quickly- our biggest hurdle was the speed at which we could spin up new Contact cells and send them out to continue the work. Well, that and the parts of the world overrun by narrative-driven disasters. _Those_ tended to require my intervention, or that of Delmutt’s little colony of hyper-advanced robot people, who had managed to get quite _busy_ in the couple hundred years they’d had alone in the ol’ hyperbolic time chamber.

Anyway rather than a routine survey, the flyer crew had found _this_ guy. The kid had turned him on the local infomorphs that first night- and he’d taken half the buildings with them as he swept them all in moments, just blasting from place to place with x-ray and laser vision. After that he’d apparently been keeping charge of a rather bedraggled looking group of humans and the one eight year old who actually held the reins on him. The kid had no family left, and the surveyor said everyone else was living in abject terror of him, though they couldn’t get anyone to tell them _why_ with the hero flitting about. It didn’t seem like it took a great deal of imagination to figure out, if you asked me. I’d teleported in to intervene when he’d tried to prevent the survey team from leaving- I’d done without swapping to a human guise, and that had proved to be a critical mistake. One word from the kid and Superman had pasted me right through the town’s grain elevator, kicking this whole thing off. And now here we were, back in the bullshit.

“You know that this is bullshit, right?” I asked, trying desperately to avoid another lightning-fast punch. It was no good- I could feel bones giving, setting from regeneration, then giving again just as fast under his onslaught. “Nobody here is offering you any kind of fight! Why won’t any of you assholes ever _listen to me?!?”_

He grimaced, as he swung in to hammer me again. “What I know is that there is a very scared little boy over there, miss, and he has a pretty solid idea of right and wrong. He tells me what’s bothering him, and I sort it out. Now I can promise you, if you _leave_ here, we won’t come after you. But if you stay here- well, I’ll do what I have to. If you want to talk in the meantime, I’ll listen. But it won’t change my mind.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if I _could_ just go away, I thought, and leave this little pocket of hell to the boy and his monstrous friend. _Empathy, empathy,_ I chided myself silently. I’d been having trouble with that again, without Sean around to ground me. Being a dragon was more than just muscle and scale- it seemed like it was affecting my mind around the edges. But I had debts to pay, and I wouldn’t forget them. I owed it to the rest of the town to get them out, and I couldn’t leave guys like this just roaming the countryside if they had no self control. Easily half of the narrators I’d met had turned out to be pretty non-threatening, in one way or another- tapped into dramas with reasonably sedate powers, or no powers at all. I’d been a particular fan of the lady who’d joined a family of friendly vegetarian vampires that seemed mostly to want to live in the woods and have feelings at one another- they were fairly harmless and super, _super_ killable if they stepped out of line. But just as often you’d find something like this, where a kid’s take on Superman had become a natural disaster for everyone around him. One thing that I had noticed- narrators could often _distort_ a character, but they couldn’t be outright _untrue_ to it. Superman would never be a serial murderer, for example. But he _could_ be a gullible oaf with enough strength to pop the Earth’s crust like a soap bubble. I wondered what happened when a narrator tried to outright force a character into non-canon behavior, and then _stopped_ wondering as Superman punched me again, hard enough that my ribs punctured a lung. I let myself sail through the air while I healed. _Is this what life is just_ like _for all of us, from now on? Is this what the rest of the universe deals with all the time?_ Sean’s first letter had made me wonder. I’d read lots of fiction and it didn’t _seem_ like every corner of the multiverse was just seventeen shades of fucked, but that was certainly our local story.

Superman had knocked me up into the air this time, which was his mistake. One of the nice things about _infinite wishes_ was that it also meant more-or-less infinite access to spells via _Pages of Spell Knowledge_. I readied one. “Alright, we can talk. I have a joke for you- what’s Superman’s greatest weakness?” He didn’t answer, but that was all right because my timing couldn’t really get any worse. “A bucking horse.” I let fly with the _Hideous Laughter_ spell- he doubled over, wheezing uncontrollably. _It’s a damn good thing his reflex actions don’t have super-strength._ I continued. “Because of the guy who used to play...? Okay, it was kind of insensitive, sorry. I’m not very good at jokes. The actual answer is _magic_. You’re really bad at resisting _magic._ ” Not so bad that his different-story immunities to mind magic wouldn’t kick in within literal seconds, but a few seconds of him not zipping around was all I needed.

He might be able to _exert_ thousands of tons of force, but he still only _weighed_ a couple hundred. As long as he wasn’t trying to hold himself fixed in the air, I could suckerpunch him in whatever direction I chose. As he wheezed and flailed helplessly, a _Gate_ opened to one of the dimensions containing my prepared kinetic impactor sequences. I still didn’t have a good way to create vacuums, so the first couple shots were simply hypervelocity projectiles to shove all of the air out of the way. They impacted his chest without him even registering their existence. The _last_ one in the sequence was a solid tungsten rod weighing about two hundred pounds and traveling at 0.2c, and _that_ finally got his attention. He was knocked sailing through the air at a velocity even _he_ couldn’t react fast enough to cancel, as the rod just annihilated itself in nuclear fire on his body. I intercepted his vector with a second Gate to a pocket dimension I’d been using as a prison for story elements I didn’t really have the capacity to deal with. He wouldn’t starve in there, it was set to timelessness with respect to most biological necessities, and maybe the other… _things_ I’d picked up in the last month would keep him entertained. Maybe he’d find some way to deal with a few of them and reduce my workload. _Wouldn’t_ that _be nice_ , I thought to myself. My more-or-less permanent _Contingency_ spell triggered when the nuclear collision occurred. Since the Tower incident I had it set to intercept any energetic event releasing over 1 kiloton with a _Prismatic Sphere._ If even 1% of the total energy of that rod had been released when it transferred its momentum to the invincible superhuman, we were looking at something in the 400kt range, probably similar to the warhead I’d detonated at the tower last month. The _Sphere_ had proven quite capable of handling even the worst excesses that I’d thrown at it so far, thankfully. _Destroys all objects and effects, indeed_. Anything that escaped could be treated with anti-poison spells, because for some reason Pathfinder treated radiation as a poison effect- at least that made it easy for me. And then, finally, blessed silence descended. I surveyed the carnage. “I probably could have just… shoved you in there, couldn’t I.” Oh well, no time for additional self recrimination.

I landed in front of the little boy as the echoes of our fight which couldn’t have lasted more than a minute in total continued to roll and reverberate between cloud and hill and floodplain. I didn’t bother to change shape. My manners had gotten a little bit _rough_ , in the course of a month of nearly non-stop combat and emergencies. Not to mention… the home front, which I was definitely _not_ thinking about right now. He actually didn’t react to a flying dinosaur crashing to earth in front of him. Interesting- the boy was… _narrating?_

“Superman was in a dark scary place and there were monsters but he knew how to get back so he took the one with horns and threw it at the other and they went ‘Oh no it’s Supermaaan’ and they were real scared then he flew back up and-”

The crowd around the survey helicopter, on the other hand, cried out in terror as the enormous, scaled, horned, bat-winged golden _monster_ came crashing down right in front of them. My Contact team tried to comfort them. Their captain glared at me reproachfully, and it snapped me out of my funk. _Sorry, sorry_ I mouthed at him abashedly, finally downshifting back to human, stamping down on the fear aura that I emanated naturally these days and allowing the crowd to settle. The little boy was staring at me in defiance as I walked up to him and knelt. It was interesting to watch the kid- we weren’t really sure how narrators _worked_ , or interacted, and we’d rarely seen them in action. I hadn’t even begun to tell my story, though I still felt the power residing within me. Was the fact that the kid was telling Superman’s story even as we spoke going to make him more dangerous, or less? After a moment I realized that I was being the detached observer and not Haley, Hero Of Earth again.

“Superman knew he had to get back but he wasn’t scared, he always got out of no matter how big the bad guys were-”

I nodded. “Well yeah, he’s _Superman_. But he doesn’t need to fight me. He can just be your friend.” I looked up at the rest of the crowd, who were giving us a respectful (terrified) distance. “We’re here to help. We have food and shelter for all of you, and a transport link to our network, and then we’ll see about getting you involved in the recovery efforts if you want to help, or just getting some rebuilding teams out here if you want to stay, and-” the kid cut me off.

“Christopher wasn’t going to go with the scary lizard woman. Nobody was! Nobody kept him safe when it mattered. Mom and Dad just _ran away_ when the bug monsters came, so he called Superman and he came and now he helps me. Superman wouldn’t let anyone leave! Christopher was good enough! They don’t need to go anywhere!”

He was having some trouble with tense changes, I thought detachedly. My surveyors were watching all of this. I didn’t need to strain my ears to hear them when they asked one of the crowd, “How many dead?”

The person answering, an old mill worker by the look of him, shook his head. “Half the town, maybe five thousand, the night of. A couple dozen more when his _friend_ went nuts on the bugs. Since then, only two tried to get away. He caught both of them. Broken bones, no deaths. He just _flies around_ and, and _watches._ Day and night.” I winced, reminded once again of my own casualty count. _When you get past a certain point it gets very hard to get energetic around people and not leave a trail of bodies in your wake._

I transitioned from kneeling to sitting down in front of the boy while I listened to the voices in my head. On the back end, one of my simulacra was relaying these conversations to a team I’d set up, crisis managers and emergency operators working at a moderate 2-to-1 time-shift back in Volo Ingenium. They had a little more time to assess, and a lot more expertise at a safe distance, back in the situation room. Their response via my simulacra’s link was immediate- “Kitchener here. Team says he’s got abandonment trauma and PTSD, possibly from before the Swap, but if both of his parents were taken that might have been the trigger. He’ll be experiencing feelings of helplessness and inadequacy, fear that everyone is going to leave him, a desire for total control. Best response is validation and sympathy. Demonstrate ownership of the situation and long term stability- he’s going to be a problem for a while, especially if he can call on anything else from _DC_ comics. I have a child psychologist and a care team ready, if you can bring him in.”

We needed to pull the teeth on this one. But my self-imposed rule about killing still stood- _especially_ not children. I didn’t disagree with the assessment, though. I looked the kid in the eye. “What’s your name?” He was still staring at me angrily. 

“Christopher told her his name was Christopher and that she needed to leave here, and go away. If she didn’t Superman was going to get out and beat her up!”

I put my hands out to my sides as I sat- open, non threatening. I was leaning _hard_ on the _Diplomacy_ checks to radiate a calm that I was long past able to feel naturally. Luckily for me, I had _Diplomacy_ skills that would have put Eleanor Roosevelt to shame. “My name is Haley, Christopher. Aren’t you tired? Of being the only one you can count on?” My skill told me to cock my head just so, quirk my eyebrow like _this._ Inquisitive without being judgemental. He stamped his foot- I could see tears in his eyes. 

“The lady was being weird, she was acting nice and that wasn’t how bad guys did at all, but she was trying to get him to calm down and he was scared and Momma had _warned_ him about strangers and Superman hadn’t escaped yet! He punched _really hard_ at the walls of the place he was in. Nobody else could protect Christopher!”

I nodded and smiled. “You did a good job, Christopher. Really! A whole month, and I’ve seen the kind of things out there in the world now, and you kept these people safe. But it’s okay now. It’s okay! We’re putting the world back together.” Something was happening, behind me, high in the sky. There was a cracking sound, like distant thunder. _The spot where I put my Gate_. _That absurdity is going to punch his way out of my prison dimension isn’t he._ I think we were rapidly settling the question of whether or not an active narrator was more _powerful_. But maybe it was a trade-off? One who was actively narrating didn’t have a passive guarantee of survival, once they’d caught up. _I could kill this kid now and it wouldn’t violate his narrative causality because he’s already told his story_. I shook my head, dismissing the dark impulse. _Human thoughts, Haley_. 

“The lady heard Superman punching out of her trap and she was _real_ scared and knew she should run.”

I sighed. “I’m not going to run, Christopher. I’m not scared. I have my _own_ story.”

“She… _wasn’t_ going to run?”

I pointedly _did not_ glance behind me at whatever the thing that was not the _least little bit_ human was doing to the sky. “No. I’m here to help you, I can’t do that if I run. You have to stop the story some time, Christopher.” He looked really uncertain, but curious.

“She didn’t do anything scary or try to eat him like the _other_ monsters Superman had fought but what if it was a trick?”

He was listening, and I couldn’t let the opportunity pass me by. I spoke a bit faster, held my hand out. “Christopher, Superman has so _many_ other people he needs to save, and we can take care of you now. I bet there are things you miss. Have you had him tuck you in, or make you breakfast?” He shook his head sadly and I continued. “It’s hard to go through life being _strong_ all the time. You know that. You can relax now, if you want, and we’ll be strong for you.”

“Christopher was scared though. Without Superman who’s left that even knows me? Everyone else is d- gone.”

“I’ve got someone you’re really going to want to meet. His name’s _Dog_ and he’s _great_ with kids.” _Well, these days, anyway._ “And I can take you home, introduce you to some other brave girls and boys who have had a rough time too, this last month. You can call Superman back any time you like, if it isn’t working out for you.” I heard something in the sky _shatter_ and felt the wind of Superman’s sudden arrival at my back like a hurricane. But he didn’t smash me flat. I didn’t know if that was his impulse of Christopher’s but I held still, hand still out. “I’m not going to fight him, or you. The most important part about being a hero is knowing when it’s time to stop fighting and help each other.” _Take your own damn advice there, girl._

“Superman said that was right. He had other people he needed to help, and he thought Christopher would be okay if the lady took care of him. But he left his secret signal watch just in case. He gave Christopher a hug and then he left.”

I watched it happen, just as Christopher said. All of us stood by as the Man of Steel flew into the sky and that presence faded from the world, like a comic half-remembered. _Not gone, but… dormant._ The kid was eight, in the end. He just needed someone to look at him without _fear_ in their eyes. He took my hand, burst into tears, and ran close for another hug. _And I inherit another lost soul_. As I held him and the crowd visibly sagged with relief, I considered. Most of the time these days, I _hated_ being a hero. But… it had some good moments.

\----

An hour later, we walked through the new gate from the kid’s town into Volo Ingenium. There was a special “transit” subsection of the world-spanning city that I’d cordoned off entirely for this world network. Pre-Swap there were something like 4,000 cities on Earth and maybe ten times that in towns and houses. I’d asked Delmutt’s unbelievably efficient construction drones to build me a space that could helpfully link 50,000 or so stops together while maintaining security at some boundary with the rest of my dimension. Appropriately enough, they’d chosen to construct a forest. An enormous forest half the size of Manhattan, with trees larger than the empire state building, but still. Each node branch terminated in a 20-foot gate, or a podium where one could be installed. Each tree itself could hold several hundred, and the trunks themselves were connected through the roots via some form of subway-esque antigrav system. All told you could get from any one population center on Earth to another in under half an hour. Emergency flyers could take you from one branch to the other side of the world in minutes. And the edges of the vast forest were cordoned by rivers on all sides, and electronic monitoring beyond that, restricting any trickle of refugees into the areas that the infomorphs now considered home territory. It was all still under construction but it was really helping with our response times.

Christopher didn’t care about any of that, of course. He was enchanted by the giant trees, and the world-sized bubble made out of cities. “What _is_ this place? Can I fly here?” He jumped off the ground and stretched his hands out- I caught him, lifted him up.

“Nope, gravity’s a bit too high for that, but the Wiltshire Dog might have a solution for you. Say hello, Dog.” I _knew_ that mutt had to be lurking around here somewhere. He was always just inside the gates these days, waiting to needle me. I spun around searching and Christopher laughed, in my arms.

“Another stray?”  came the languorous voice, as the canine snout materialized out of thin air. Luckily the kid wasn’t the sort to start at that- he laughed and stretched out from my arms to pet the Dog, who drifted slightly out of reach. “For a childless couple, you have the _strangest_ way of accumulating children.”

“As opposed to yours, luring them down rabbit holes into opium dens?” I taunted. My bravado didn’t last very long. I sighed, seeing two other people already waiting patiently for us. _My next appointment._ “Honestly, Dog, you’re one to talk. We’re all kind of broken here, can’t you just… help me take care of them, without making it a big issue? Also, please don’t do that.”

The Dog’s head turned upside down. His body was still not in evidence. “Do _what?_ ”

“That- _couple_ thing. Sean’s _gone_ and who knows when he’ll be back and I’m trying to _deal_ with it. I don’t need constant reminders of what-”

The Dog vanished from the air and appeared at my legs. I released Christopher and he jumped on the beast, laughing- they wrestled and honestly it looked to _me_ like the Dog was enjoying it, but he still managed to fix me with his stare and continue our argument. “What you’ve _lost?_ A most appropriate adjective. Something taken away, unable to be recovered. But also to be unable to find one’s way- not knowing one’s whereabouts. So which is it, with you and him? Gone forever, or simply- _misplaced_? You haven’t been _looking_ very hard.”

God, I did not _need_ this. “You’re a real shit, Dog, and the wordplay doesn’t help. _Yes_ , I’m angry with him for up and running off while I have to stay here and save the world, and I’m trying real hard not to examine that feeling. Happy now?”

The Dog simply looked quizzical. “Should I be? Forgive me, I haven’t read many comics, so I’m uncertain- does the superhero who keeps running into the burning building _usually_ blame the mortal outside, who runs off to call the fire department?”

I grimaced and turned to walk away from this conversation. “She does if he’s the one that doused her with super-serum in the first place! _He_ could have-”

The Dog got up from his pile with Christopher and kept pace, the boy holding onto his tail and trailing along. “Could have _what?_ Taken the thing he thought you wanted _most_ for himself?”

_That_ touched a nerve, and I wasn’t about to admit it was because I was swiftly learning how much I _didn’t_ want to be a hero. I whirled so fast it scared the boy, and pointed a finger at the Dog. “Don’t you _dare_ argue for him by- by _proxy_. He should have _asked_. He should have _stayed_. If he wants to make amends he can damn well send me a fucking _owl_ from Hogwarts and _apologize_.” I knew I was being irrational. So what! My anger was righteous. Fuck him and fuck the Dog.

The Dog was silent, for a time. “You love him. But you don’t _trust_ him. That’s why it hurts.” _What?_ I rolled my eyes, but there was a seed of truth in what he was saying, and I kept my ears open. Rule one of being a rational person in love- know the source of your feelings. “Deep down you think he’d rather be where he is, than here with you.”

I sniffed. “Wouldn’t he?”

The Dog shook his great shaggy head. “When we parted, if I’d told him that all he had to do to see you again was cut his own throat a _second_ time, he’d have asked to borrow my butter-knife. And here _you_ are- you know this is the first time I’ve seen you stay human in form for more than ten minutes, since the day he died?” _That can’t be true-_ I thought back. I really couldn’t come up with a counter-example, which disturbed me. “You two are _miserable_ without each other, no matter your universe. Don’t make the mistake of blaming the other for the pain of separation.”

Alright fine, he had a point. I shifted back to dragon-scale as we approached the pair at the end of the branch. A simulacrum-me smiled at Christopher and took him in one hand, while he asked a million questions. “Yes, I’m her too, no, we aren’t all sisters, _yes_ , we can go flying later, no it’s more like I have a copy of her mind but she’s the only one with a will that keeps us all moving-” I tuned them out. I had a far more dangerous enemy waiting ahead of me now. All my scale armor and magically-enhanced muscle wouldn’t help me now.

“Hi, Mom.”


	29. Chapter 29

\----

Sean, Lost In Time And Space

\----

“So,” I said, putting the finishing touches on my letter. “Can you direct me to the nearest exit?” The Wiltshire Dog took letter and ring in his mouth, made a gesture that I interpreted as “Later,” and vanished. “Well, I guess that’s me staying put for the time being,” I said to the empty air. I honestly wasn’t sure if what I was looking for was a physical _place_ , anyway. Dog just kind of came and went from one story to another regardless of the barrier, but I’d only traveled through stories via dreams and death. “I need something more permanent than the one, and less painful than the other.”

Out here beyond the barrier of our world I’d initially thought that one could just… step _in and out_ of one story or another, but on reflection that couldn’t be right. If it were that easy every story that we knew of would have been just a mass of incomprehensible characters, all working at cross-purposes to each other with muddled results. Narratively unsatisfying, in other words. People only crossed over… _when the story requires them._ I mused to Randall Flagg’s bones, as I sat next to him. “I hypothesize that you can’t get _into_ another story unless you’re aligned with it narratively, in some way. Every story-within-a-story has to have a narrator willing to describe it to sustain its presence. I’m my _own_ narrator, ultimately, so I can sustain myself? But if I want to get into a version of Hogwarts, I’ll have to find some variant of that place where my presence would further the larger purpose of the world. Or some version where nobody’s keeping watch on the walls. Right?” The bones were unhelpfully silent.

I focused on my desire to learn magic. To become part of the school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, do a nice accelerated-education program there, get out with a wand and a working knowledge of magic. Maybe give Dumbledore a piece of my mind about child endangerment. I felt like that didn’t narrow it down much- but I also knew there was no incompetent adult wizard named Sean in any of the books, and probably not many fanfics, either. “So where do I get in?” I laid back and closed my eyes- then leapt up with a start. I could _see them_. With my eyes closed, I could still see the spheres!

I closed them again and looked around in awe. The crystalline objects I’d seen before, in my brief journeys from one body to another. Millions of them, uncountable- nestled within and without, intersecting and colliding. _They must be the worlds of our stories_. They surrounded, permeated. There were too many to take in. “I don’t think everyone outside our little universe gets this view, or there’d be a lot more written about it,” I muttered, staring upwards through closed eyelids. Which meant this was a tool intended for me, somehow- what could I do with this? “Harry Potter,” I said. Nothing. “Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone?” Not a twitch. “Okay, not a book title or a character. Uh. JK Rowling?” Nope. “Hogwarts.” _That_ got a reaction- my vision of the spheres _spun_ , and a collection of thousands of tiny orbs contained within a larger framework came into view. They were _linked_ , somehow, to each other and through each other, some seeming to spin off from the ones before, others standing independent, but still thematically the same. “I’m looking at every work centered in Hogwarts, aren’t I.” The realization was sudden, and accompanied by more- that these stories were _only_ in Hogwarts. As I had specified. What’s more, I didn’t see a single one that felt like a good entry point- not in the way that Wonderland had, previously.

“Uh, let’s change scope. Magical Britain?” The spheres _wooshed_ again, this time with a distinct zooming out feel, and I was once more presented with a collection of thousands of spheres- bigger, this time, more complex, but also less distinct around the edges, more intertwined. “Lots of stories set there, but not many bother to dress it up or distinguish their version of Magical Britain from the others, I’m guessing.” But not a single one afforded me entry. I felt like I could _force_ my way in, or more accurately simply ditch this body and become another _within_ the story, but “Would I really be me, or-?” I was a bit concerned. Every other time I’d moved between stories, I’d done it without carrying my physical body along. But results as far as holding onto my memories, my _self_ , had been mixed. “If consciousness is just a waveform, and these bodies are the media that we propagate through, then skipping from one to another without carrying the brain makes sense. But why do I remember my lives here, and not elsewhere?”

“Because you already had a body here,” came the answer, startling me out of my reverie as Dog paced back into my little camp. “You walked here in dreams and left an impression, to be picked up when your consciousness returned.”

I sat up. “Back so soon- everything okay then? Randall gone, wife triumphant?” I didn’t really have any doubt, but I still felt relief when he nodded. _She’ll be fine_. I put it from my mind, for now. Trying to imagine her life for her had got us into this mess, after all. “Good. So, how do I leave an impression in a place I’ve never been? It doesn’t seem like it’s a big hurdle for the _other_ story characters. Aslan and Randall stepped into our world whole and intact, albeit… _shaded_ a little bit, by their narrators.”

The Dog bobbed his head. “They had invitations, and their patterns were well known in your world. _You_ are inviting _yourself_ , and the only copy of your story that anyone else knows is… unrepresentative.” He eyed me with some amusement.

I huffed, “Not _that_ unrepresentative. Just less adventurous.” I hadn’t had time to read the romance version of our lives, but I’d pick up a copy before too long and figure out why everyone who _had_ read it kept giving me _looks_. “That doesn’t explain the infomorphs or the Swap, though. As far as we know they don’t even have a narrator.”

He appeared unconcerned. “ _Nothing_ explains the infomorphs, which means they must be something terribly clever. I’m surprised I wasn’t involved. But let’s leave them out of this, for the time being.”

“Okay, so I can’t travel there if I haven’t ‘Left an impression’ first without losing my mind, and I can’t leave an impression through writing because this version of our story is too off the rails. Coherent, but inconvenient.”

The Dog began to pace around me, sniffing the ground. “Lucky for you, this is a crossroads of sorts. Minds wander to Wonderland from all sorts of places, but most especially from the many places in the multiverse that identify as the ‘United Kingdom.’ Perhaps even the occasional young woman who might be considering her own version of that world to which you are inclined. Shall I arrange… introductions?”

I nodded happily. “Yes, please!” Then reconsidered. “Uh, maybe somewhere that isn’t here?” I was, after all, still standing over the half-shattered bones of a dead man, holding two pistols.

“Oh no,” said the Dog, grinning. “I think this will leave _quite_ the impression.” He pulled his vanishing act before I could stop him, and for a moment I was alone. But not for long. The tall grass around my little tableau rustled in the breeze, and the stream behind me burbled. Within minutes the rustling took on a more _directed_ affect, and soon a young woman no older than 16 crawled out of the grass, on hands and knees, like she was looking for something. She wasn’t _dressed_ like an Alice- she had a halter top and jeans on- but she was certainly muttering to herself like one.

“How odd, I could have sworn he was just ahead of me and- oh!” She noticed me standing there. I’d holstered my guns and made some effort to look non threatening, but I figured the sight of a strange man standing over a skeleton in _this_ of all places was probably going to give anyone pause. “Have you seen a small blue dog with beady red eyes, by any chance? Only I was just following him through the grass and he seems to have vanished,” she said, not missing a beat. Okay I guess she wasn’t all that phased after all.

“Been in Wonderland a while, have you?” I asked wryly. “Yeah I’ve seen him, but I’m not sure where he is _now_. Probably causing trouble for my wife.”

She blew out her lips and sat down. “I feel like I’ve been here for _weeks_ , just going round and round in circles. Always animals and allegories, it’s enough to turn my head. _You_ seem normal enough. Are you some kind of metaphor for life?” She gestured at the bones next to me. At least she’d noticed them. Kind of alarming what you could get used to, wandering around here.

“No, not a metaphor. Randall there might have been, hard to say” I said, looking at the ancient and crumbling things. “Just another traveller. Name’s Sean, nice to meet you.”

“Harriet, likewise” said the young woman, finally standing up. “Walk with me for a while, then? It would be so nice to have an actual human being for company.” She turned and kept on moving through the tall grass, while I accompanied her.

“I’m not even sure I _count_ , for all intents and purposes,” I warned her. “But I know what you mean. The first time I ran into Wonderland a beaver with a cockney accent tried to get me to burn myself alive. Things can get a bit odd.”

She gave me a look like she didn’t quite believe me. “You’re _sure_ you’re not metaphorical?”

I poked myself. “Reasonably. I’m guessing you’ll be wanting a way _out_ of here, then?” She nodded eagerly. “I’ll be honest- the Dog probably led you to me because I’m looking for the same thing. You’re dreaming here, but I’m here for _real,_ and I need to get out through a… story, that you might write some time in the future. I need you to put me in it, as _me_. Sean, the uh, actual me, not the character.”

She looked crestfallen. “Oh, you _are_ some kind of lesson, then.” I guess I was far too insane to be believable as a real person. But she brightened a little bit as the rest of it sunk in “But you know how to get out!”

My patience was not infinite. “Yes. _Look_ , Harriet- do you write Harry Potter fanfiction?”

She blushed and looked away. “Yeeeees, sometimes.” Then she squinted at me suspiciously. “I’ve only ever done it online! And I didn’t use my real name, I was ScribbleWitch! How did you know about that? Are you some kind of creepy dream stalker?”

I facepalmed. “No. My dog might be, but I don’t answer for him. I just need to get to a functional Hogwarts. You agree to write me into your next story, and I’ll tell you how to get out of here.” A pang of conscience hit me. “I mean, I’d tell you how to get out of here _anyway,_ but this helps us both.”

She just looked puzzled. “You just don’t seem like the type who’d want- you know what, never mind. How could I write you? I don’t really know anything _about_ you!”

Well, that was true. We were passing a field of chair-sized toadstools, so I stopped and took a seat. “Okay, pull up a chair. I’ve been needing to dump some narration for a while now, and you’re a good test audience.” She sat, looking a little bit frustrated at yet another delay. “Don’t worry, time is wonky here, this probably won’t take a minute. So there I was, at 9 o’clock on a Friday, trying to fetch my wife’s cat in a thunderstorm…”

\---

Substantially more than a minute later I’d finished my tale, and told Harriet the trick to getting out of Wonderland (get scared badly enough and you’d wake up like it was all a nightmare). She agreed to write me into the story she was working on, something titled “The Cauldron Stirred” which sure sounded odd to _me_ , but what did I know, I wasn’t familiar with the vagaries of HP fanfiction. She wouldn’t send me to Hogwarts as an adult though. “That’s okay, right? It would be weird if there was some guy there named Sean, it would distract the reader. You’ll be there and _I’ll_ know you’re there but like… in the background, as a student.” I said that would be fine, and she left to get scared awake.

Once more I laid down in a quiet glen and closed my eyes, and _this_ time I didn’t need to sort and filter- I saw the sphere immediately, and felt the tug of it. Another world where my presence wasn’t just accepted- it was _required_. I guessed she’d get around to writing that fic after all, then. _Here goes nothing,_ I thought to myself, and let the pull take me. Leaving my body behind, I soared through the void once more, that great fractal entity pulling me in faster and faster until I struck the surface and awoke-

To find a great white owl tapping at my window with a letter for me. _Harriet, you beautiful young woman, you did it. You got me in._ I leapt out of bed only to fall flat on my face. 11-year-old me was substantially shorter with much more gangly proportions. I hope I didn’t look like I _actually_ had when I was 11. I used to dress in the most absurdly conservative button-downs. Haley looking at old family photos once said I looked like “A junior mortician,” whatever _that_ meant. I opened the window and let the owl in, taking the letter with a soft “Thank you.” It was addressed to “Sean Peakes” which I supposed would have to do. Yadda yadda, entrance to Hogwarts, term to begin on 1 September, have all your things ready. “Wait,” I said- “What _month_ is it?” I assumed it was some year in the 90’s, assuming I was being kicked into a Harry Potter time frame, but- did I have to sit around this house all summer before I got on with it? That seemed an enormous waste of time.

I took a risk. “Moooooom! I got a letter!” If it was a Muggle family I’d have to do this anyway- if it was magical, this might solve a couple problems. But there was no response- the house, now that I thought about it, was _absolutely_ silent. My room wasn’t even particularly furnished- the bed, a chair, a single change of clothes so at least I wouldn’t go out _naked_. That was it? “Harriet, did you not give local-me a background?” I poked my head out of my door and looked around- sure enough, the house was empty and dark. “Just a spawn point, then.” So I’d have to make my own way through Magical London. In some ways that was liberating- I wouldn’t need to worry about breaking the heart of some random family by disappearing. In others, I was quite literally destitute and I needed to travel halfway across England and acquire a number of hard-to-obtain educational materials in the next couple months. What did I have on hand? I checked my pockets. Fat lot of nothing, nothing, and- my face lit up. _A wand_. I felt _compelled_ to examine it. Nine and one-quarter inches long, made of a white hornbeam, with a core of dragon heartstring. _Of course that’s the core_. Okay. Nothing to me but my name, the clothes on my back, an invitation to a school… at some point, and the ability to cast spells but no training. _Let’s get on with it, then_.

\-----

“... And just for a moment, he _was_ a man. And the vorpal sword in my hands went snicker-snack.” I finished, and there was a smattering of polite applause throughout the Hog’s Head Inn. I think they felt a bit awkward hearing such dark stories from someone so young, but the Hog’s Head crowd was a bit coarser than the usual barroom. In magical Britain they knew a little kid might not be what he seemed at all, so they kept their heads down and clapped politely when the entertainment was done. I’d been paying room and board with my stories for a while- my bank accounts didn’t transfer to new realities with my death, it seemed. Quite inconvenient but Aberforth was a genial enough sort.

I got down off my stool by the hearth- everything was _much_ taller, I reflected, when you were only about 11 years old- and wandered over to the bar. No matter how old I insisted I was, the cagey old bastard still wouldn’t sell me a beer, but that was fine- _moderate_ hardships were to be expected. I stared longingly at the taps in the sincere hope that my “Wild” magic might provide. He nodded to me amicably as he wiped out cups with a rag that looked like it hadn’t been washed since 1920. Magical Britain didn’t really seem to have grasped the fundamentals of Pasteur’s work on germ theory- possibly because they had so many spells that made it unnecessary, but still. The hygiene standards were positively medieval at times. “Albus said he’d be by today,” muttered the old barkeep. “Bout time too, you been darkening my doorstep for near-on a week now and I ain’t running no kindergarten.”

I gestured behind me at the room. “Attendance is _up,_ isn’t it? I’m making you money with my stories, so don’t bellyache to _me_ about impropriety.” I still had about a month before the start of term, but I was glad to finally be meeting the old wizard. I had a lot of questions- I had verified that this was, in fact, Harry’s first year at the school. It wasn’t even hard to find out, half the magical world was buzzing with rumors about the kid. But I didn’t plan to simply match his progress. For one thing I didn’t know how long this story would last. But for another- I had some _suspicions_ about the nature of Hogwarts and I was going to do my best to pry some answers out of the Chief Mugwump or whatever title he had at this point. “Do you think he’s going to take kindly to some random kid calling him out here and peppering him with questions?”

“Oh, I’ve been peppered with _worse,”_ said a creaky old baritone from directly behind me. _What is it with inscrutable magic people and showing up right behind me?_ I jumped, and turned in my stool to meet the gaze of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, the man himself. He was wearing the tasseled cap and traditional grey bathrobe that seemed to be his signature look in this time period. His wand was not in evidence, thankfully, and I did not sense any tension about him- for the moment at least, I was not under any particular threat, then. I breathed a sigh of relief and took a drink of the _delightful_ pilsner that had recently appeared in my hand. Thanks, magic!

I couldn’t resist a bit of curiosity. “You know, 60 years ago you were wearing three-piece suits and making them _work_ for you. How come you switched it up?”

He chuckled but took it in stride, sitting down on a stool next to me. “I learned that people take you much more seriously as a practitioner of magic if you don’t look like you’re about to sell them _insurance_. Also,” he tugged at the robes, “these turned out to be _quite_ comfortable. But your question, I’m afraid, raises several more.” He peered at me, not quite serious yet- or _was_ he? I noticed that Aberforth had backed off to the other side of the bar, and the other patrons were giving us a wide berth. “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve heard the tales you weave here, of a night. Most interesting. You’re not from _around_ here are you, Mr… Peakes, was it?” I couldn’t help but nod as I peered into his eyes. _I don’t think I’m fully in control right now_. I doubted I could lie if I _wanted_ to. Luckily for me, I didn’t want to. “And yet here you are now, with a head full of the most _peculiar_ knowledge. What brings you to our own little corner of the story-verse?”

I started again. “Wait, you _know_ you’re in a story?”

He nodded easily. “Do they write me as a fool, Mr. Peakes? We’re in a world with _magical powers_ yet our society is inexplicably backwards, I myself have defeated two _evil overlords_ with the assistance of grand prophecies, and we have yet another potential chosen one arriving at our school this very month. I would be more surprised to learn that there was _not_ some narrative hand at work. Your own tales confirm this. But again I must ask your intentions.”

I looked at him. _Really_ looked at him. Old, ancient, _sharp_ , but he was not a bared blade. He was a microscope, and I was his subject. _This is my test_. I chose honesty. “I need to learn magic, sir. _Real_ magic. From as many sources as I can. This is my first stop, because whatever else it is, magic in your world is easy enough that _children_ can pick it up and become reasonably competent simply through rote learning. But I need to go far beyond that. There are threats to my home, terrible threats, and the woman I love is stuck there battling them alone. I _have_ to get back to her, and to do that I need a greater understanding of the true nature of the worlds. Magic is the tool I choose to gain that understanding.” I let the desperation creep into my voice, the terrible fear that I would not learn _fast_ enough, the _hunger_ for understanding and the desire to see my wife again. It sounded strange to me, coming in my child’s voice, but Dumbledore was not phased.

“You ask a great deal. Of course we would take you and educate you- you have your letter, you certainly have the _gift_ , I verified that much. We take all in Britain who display talent- whoever writes this tale has included you among that population. But I get the impression that you don’t trust our system. Do you, Mr. Peakes?”

 _Shit, he read my mind._ I couldn’t help but notice that I could no longer hear the noises coming from the rest of the bar. _Silence spell?_ I shook my head. I was going to try to bluff a little bit- he knew I had special knowledge of his world, but he couldn’t possibly know _what_ I knew. I took care not to look him in the eye again as I spoke. “No offense, but your school system doesn’t make a lot of sense. Part of that may be the influence of the author, who was trying to be more charming than compelling, but still- the magic that is described in your school system is all _rote_. Wave a wand this way, mutter your spell with this inflection, and the same effect will happen every time. Except- _you_ , and He-Whose-Name-I’m-Not-Going-To-Say, and Grindelwald, and a half dozen other great magicians, don’t work like that at _all_. You produce effects that beggar belief, without raising a hand or touching your wand. You’ve been casting spells on _me,_ as I sit here, entirely without moving even though the students exiting at the peak of your magical education system are just barely getting the hang of doing magic without a wand. _Hogwarts itself_ defies explanation- it is _far_ too elaborate for the kind of spellcrafters it produces to have made it. Either there’s some sort of, of _magical grad school_ that never got described in the books, or you know something that you aren’t teaching to your students.”

He looked around, seemingly verifying that nobody was paying us the slightest bit of attention. It was actually a bit alarming how little interest the Supreme Muckety-Muck was drawing in this tiny bar- more magic, I assumed. But it was quite possible he could turn me into a toad in broad daylight and nobody would bat an eye. I didn’t like being in this deep when I didn’t truly _know_ the man I was speaking to. I knew _of_ him, of course, but much like Aslan I was concerned that Rowling’s interpretation of a kindly old mentor had never _quite_ matched the many child-endangering actions he seemed so habitually prone to. “Well of course I know things I’m not teaching them,” he said. “What do you think the world would look like if every one of them could summon fiendfyre at the drop of a hat, or bind and control Dementors? Our educational system is crafted to make them _functional citizens_ , Mr. Peakes, and very little more. _You_ are seeking after deeper mysteries, things that most people never consider.” Well, that confirmed one of my greatest suspicions about Hogwarts. It _was_ a conformity factory, only skimming the true surface of magic as understood by the _real_ wizards of this world. And that veil was one he didn’t seem keen on breaking, given that he’d sent Harry up against the greatest Dark Wizard of the age with little more than a disarming charm. He confirmed this- “The question is, why should I reveal them to _you_? It is not merely a test of character I am asking you to pass. A man of great moral fiber and sharp wit can still do terrible damage, when handed a loaded weapon he does not fully understand.”

I shrugged. “My world may die, if I don’t learn it. I may never see my loved ones again. I can offer you things- knowledge, of upcoming events-”

He held up a hand to stop me. “I understand your urgency. Please understand _mine_. The worst disasters in the last 100 years have come at the hands of men who know _some_ of what I have suppressed. I’ve sent a great many good men and women to their deaths at those very same hands, when I could have opened doors to understanding that might have saved them. As an educator, I have spent the greater part of my _entire life_ perverting and abusing my position, to maintain _ignorance_. I like to think that I am not an evil man, and yet-” he looked into the distance. “And yet.” He was silent, for a time. “Perhaps evil is the only possible outcome, when one grows beyond a certain level of understanding. That is the curse that I fear. Imagine, Mr. Peakes, if building an atom bomb was so simple that your average high school graduate could accomplish it.” It _was_ that simple, really, it was the _materials_ that were hard to get hold of- but I held my tongue. I understood his point well enough. “Even should I not doom my own world, to allow you to walk away with that understanding into _others_ \- what would I be unleashing?”

I sighed, conceding the battle but not the war. “You’re a practical man, Albus, and I appreciate your concerns. Would it be alright with you if, at the least, I dispensed with the artificially slow growth of the Hogwarts classes and simply worked straight from the books? Walking away from here with the abilities of a Hogwarts-educated wizard would not be _nothing_ , in the end. And I can still offer you my knowledge of future events.” _And figure out what you’re hiding on my own time._

He smiled and nodded. “Of course, learn at whatever pace you like. We shall stash you in Hufflepuff, and you may tell everyone that you are in remedial classes. Consult with the teachers as you like- nobody ever pays attention to the Hufflepuffs, they have a marvelous way of flying under the radar. Most of the truly great spies and saboteurs of the great wars came from there, did you know that?” I shook my head and he laughed delightedly. “Never even made it into the books! Good, good. As to your story-based knowledge,” he turned serious again, “I must ask that you never breathe a _word_ of it to anyone. Even me. Even if it could save lives.”

I was getting pretty frustrated. “What? Why?!? Don’t you _care_ about what happens to your students?”

He gave me a sad, small smile. “More than you can ever know, I’m afraid. Sean, if I may call you Sean. As you have said, we are participants in a story here. What do you suppose happens, when a man who is not the main character comes traipsing in and upsets the balance of events with foreknowledge and clever tactics?”

That set me to thinking. _Oh shit, I might have really screwed that up._ “Either the story would _end_ due to lack of tension, or he’d _become_ the main character, and events would recenter around him, _but go off in a completely new direction_. Oh my god.” If I wanted to be a background character, I had to _actually be a background character_. No drawing attention, no subverting the narrative. I needed to participate in Harriet’s design, and not step one foot out of line. This was going to be a tightrope.

Dumbledore nodded sagely. “Tell me only this, for I will confess my curiosity _is_ burning. The original story on which we are based- was it a tragedy, in the classical sense?”

 _Poor old man, surrounded by death and despair his entire life. No wonder he thinks of it that way_. I shook my head. “No. It was… uplifting, in its own way. And hugely beloved, the world over.” He smiled at that, _genuinely_ , and I thought that perhaps I had relieved some secret tension that he would never have admitted to feeling. _I’ll do what I can, from the sidelines._

He stood up from the stool and clapped my back. “Do not think me uncaring, Sean. To help your world, I will fund your studies- you may move into the Hufflepuff tower this very evening and get to work. When the term begins, try not to outshine the other first-years in public. And Sean,” he was suddenly staring me in the eyes despite my best intentions, and I felt three inches tall, “ _Do not get involved with the students romantically_. Do I make myself clear?” I nodded hastily and he smiled, and led me away.

All I could think of as I followed him was: _What the hell sort of story did I just get involved in?_


	30. Chapter 30

\----

Haley, Present Day

\----

“Have you thought about talking to a therapist?” Mom was riding my back, both figuratively _and_ literally, as I glided down from the canopy of the portal forest network to the single gate at the base that now connected it permanently to my lair. “Your sister always spoke really highly of that man in Midland Park, maybe you could give him a call?” Mom had adapted surprisingly well to my new monster form, but she had not assimilated _at all_ the fact that the civilized world had come to an end. Dad had disappeared, and my sister Carrie’s husband _and_ daughter had vanished, and mom had been carrying on like they had just stepped out for a smoke ever since I caught up with her a day after the tower explosion.

I tried to beat my wings as softly as I could, to keep from jostling her while I angled for the gate. We’d set it a dozen feet off the ground on either side, so I could go through it at speed without worrying about running people over. “Mom, that Man in Midland Park’ was her _ex boyfriend._ _Everyone_ is her ex boyfriend. My _wedding planner_ and _officiant_ were her ex boyfriends. Also, there’s a better than even that anyone you mention is going to be dead or gone, right now. This is hunker-down or save-the-world time! Therapy is for a more, I don’t know, _settled_ time period. I’m kind of busy.”

She patted my neck from her perch. We were working on a harness system that would let a half dozen people hang off of me simultaneously, but I didn’t have it on at the moment. Instead she rode in the crook created by the intersection of wings, forelegs, and neck. She’d insisted it was quite comfortable but I mostly thought she was up there so I couldn’t get away. “Well I don’t see why it has to be _you_ that saves the world all the time. It’s not safe! You’ve done a whole lot, why not let that Captain Roy take over? Nobody would blame you.”

We swung through the Gate at full speed, emerging into my lair. The stadium-turned-tower had been built up by Aslan’s reality-warping magic and then summarily destroyed by my fight with him and the nuclear detonation in the throne room that formed its highest peak. The ruined colosseum of the interior field, now with half a canopy of shattered stone and a surrounding field of collapsed rubble, had turned out to be an _excellent_ place to make a nest, aesthetically speaking. Sufficiently forbidding to prevent random intrusions, spacious enough that the vestigial offices of the Contact organization that hadn’t relocated to the higher-speed portal network could be located in one corner and my budding hoard could be piled in another, open enough that my draconic instincts weren’t tweaked by tight spaces and close sight lines. I verified my landing strip was clear and slowly came to a halt. My sister Carrie was not in evidence- she hadn’t been getting out much, since the Swap. _Her_ reaction, at least, I could understand. “Whether or not anyone would blame me is irrelevant, Mom. I’m the one with the wish engine and the narrative powers. Anyone else we sent into trouble spots would be at the mercy of other stories.” I raised my voice to override the objections. “I _know_ you don’t understand what I mean by all that, but please trust that I know what I’m talking about, and for now I’m the only one who can help.”

I let her down, and began walking away toward the pile I called my home. Rubble, gold and jewelry, stacked sufficiently deeply that it made a reasonable bed for a monster. It was _astonishingly_ pleasant to sit on and more-or-less the only place on this particular earth that I could relax, at the moment. I had not bothered to count it but a bed of gold coins one centimeter thick, sufficient to cover the surface area of the lower half of my body, _had_ to be somewhere in the hundreds-of-millions of US Dollars range, pre-economic crash. Delmutt’s people had… _helpfully_ provided most of the raw metal a couple of weeks ago through antigrav asteroid mining. That which I hadn’t simply wished up, anyway. I was a bit suspicious of their gifts. Not that they weren’t entirely friendly. I simply worried after having seen the shrines they had made of my simulacra that there might be something more like _tribute_ in their intent. In any case I would not look a gift horse worth the GDP of my entire _state_ in the mouth, especially when it was the most comfortable bed I’d ever had.

As I walked, I heard Captain Kitchener approaching my mother. They still hadn’t really twigged to the fact that I could hear them anywhere inside this stadium. He muttered to her, “How is she?” and I tried to let the tension out of my shoulders. I _hated_ that anyone was going to my mother as if she was some kind of authority on my mood. I hated that she was probably selling herself that way, when I wasn’t available. I had escaped her for what I thought was the rest of my life when I moved out after college, and now here we were, thrown together and her trying to run things again.

“Tense, tired, she misses her husband,” said my mother, which wasn’t _inaccurate,_ but- “She still won’t look me in the eye, Roy. There’s an edge to her and it worries me. You’re putting too much on her, she’s just a girl, she has no training for any of this.” _Rage_ boiled up in me and for a terrifying second I thought about incinerating them _both_ with a jet of white-hot fire, before I mastered myself. _She’s not wrong about one thing- there_ is _something very wrong with my temper now_. I had a feeling that living as a dragon full-time might be distorting my mind, a bit. Didn’t mean I was going to stop, though. As for the rest- _how dare she_. All my life she’d been quietly doubting my capabilities, always with love and kindness and an absolute certainty that my vision exceeded my grasp. Now here I was with my own _dimension_ and an army of genies at my beck and call, and she was _still_ trying to get the extremely _human_ Captain Kitchener to take it away from me. She continued. “I just worry about her, that’s all. She’s so convinced the world will end without her.”

Captain Kitchener echoed my thoughts. “I’m pretty sure it already ended, ma’am. But Haley’s a trooper. I’m not just working with her because she could punt me across this field. She understands what people _need_ , and she’s in a position to provide it. None of us are doing too well, with all that’s going on, but I trust her to keep us moving until the world can stand on its own again.” _That_ made my heart sing, but before I could even begin to process the joy of having someone stand by me he punctured it. “And if I turn out to be wrong about that- well, ‘Defense in depth’ is the saying. We’ll have options.” _What are you thinking, Captain?_ My eyes narrowed a bit, but I shook it off as the two of them broke off and he headed toward me. I liked to hold court from the hoard, when I was in the stadium. He’d be the first but there would surely be others along after him. I wore a _Ring of Sustenance_ these days and took the 2 hours of sleep that I still required per night in a pocket bubble with doubled time. The other 23 hours of the prime material day, I was either here coordinating or out leading the efforts.

He nodded at me as he approached. We didn’t salute in this organization, I’d emphasized that to the best of my ability. No salutes, no ranks- though I was terrible about not referring to people by the ones they’d held before they came in. No lethal weapons during rescues- to the best of my ability, no military mindset at all beyond the squad level. There were four branches to the organization- operations, planning, logistics, and incident response. Hierarchy in the organization was cell based. The cell composed of myself, Delmutt, Roy, and Dog was connected to a few others, each positioned to pass communications down. We organized for logistical effectiveness, not for strength of command. I was trying to build the first post-scarcity organization, where careerists did not need to equate promotion with success and logistics did not depend on those higher in the chain to approve your requests. Every cell had a purpose and was trusted to carry it out to the best of their ability. Our cell was for troubleshooting the heaviest-hitting problems, and applying extra-organizational resources on command. _Not_ for leadership. People kept trying to get us to lead, anyway. I’d taken to leaving Roy here as our link with the think-tanks, and Delmutt to coordinate the distribution of her own people’s technologies among our ranks. That left me nominally free to do what I did best- get thrown through factories, mostly. It was working, but after a month it still didn’t feel right to me. Something was missing from my day-to-day and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I’d named it “Contact,” after the organization from the Iain Banks Culture novels. We’d been incorporating as many people as we could as we caught up with them. Daily life had collapsed for much of the Western world in particular and we were trying to find something for people to _do_ even if it was simply recovering _more_ people. Much of the surviving US structures were wrapped up in the organization now or dependent on it in some way or another, and many around the rest of the world as well. Anyone who might have gone off to form their own armed militia I tried to snatch up, to offer purpose- anywhere scarcity threatened to erupt in violence, I tried to place my forces. So far I had not had to repeat the quarantine that had been enacted on Aslan’s followers. I wanted the whole thing to be self sustaining, a perpetual rescue and distribution operation carrying infinitely renewable food, water, and shelter throughout the world and perhaps to colonies beyond, once things had stabilized here. Delmutt’s people were working on the power and communications- when her solutions were ready, our network would distribute them as well. If the wish engine failed or I was killed I wanted the whole world to already be post-scarcity or at least out of danger of starvation. It didn’t hurt that right now, many governments around the world were shattered, and our organization was the first structure most people had seen in a six very chaotic weeks. 

“Miss Haley, good to see you. Everything go okay with the latest Extra?” Roy asked. Extra had been the term they threw around, from the period when many people thought all the story stuff was just aliens- extraterrestrials. Some of them _still_ thought that way, try as I might to convince them otherwise.

I tried to put on my most polite smile for him. I was still getting the hang of smiling with a mouth full of foot-long fangs. “Captain. It’s fine, the boy who was narrating it, Christopher, has joined us and hopefully my simulacra is introducing him to the Colonel’s kids now.” We had several organizational cells developed for dealing with the many varieties of broken family created by the Swap, but the kids Aslan had tried to crown I was still paying particularly close attention to. They had an apartment in Hive Mutt, near their dad, and I tried to visit Skylar every day or at the very least have one of my clone-sisters do it. I didn’t retain their memories, but I could process a lot of what they saw through the telepathic bond- far more than a human could over a video phone, and still maintain full focus through my real body as well. I continued with the Captain. “Is there some other threat that needs immediate action?”

He shook his head. “No, you take it easy for a bit. There’s a bunch of people wanting to meet you, of course, but all the Contact cells seem to be okay for the moment.” We had distribution centers set up worldwide through centralized points in the gate network- the survey teams would come in, get set up with additional gates and supplies, then head out to uncontacted points. If they found anything unusual they’d call it in- if it turned out to be narrator activity, we had more specialized cells of psychologists, hostage-negotiators, crisis-response councilors, and in some cases SWAT officers. It was only in the face of a threat of _significant_ loss of life that I would be called in to intervene. That still left me running out a half-dozen times per day, and not always for “Extras.” Too often it was simply human-on-human violence breaking out the world over. I’d had a busy couple of days immediately after the tower incident cleaning up hot spots, once we figured out how to sweep radiation with Pathfinder spells. The Captain looked a bit embarrassed as he broached his next topic, though. “I do want to ask, before you get to all of the petitioners- what are your plans, when the crisis is over? When you’ve got all the Extras on your side or in lockdown, when we’ve touched most of the remaining people. What are you going to do with this organization?”

I blinked. I hadn’t really considered longer term. “Well, I guess there’s always world domination.” He didn’t look amused at that so I followed up. “Joking, Captain, I’m joking. I don’t know, to be honest. This is the largest crisis the world has ever seen, and coordinating the rescue efforts from the front line has occupied all my time. Frankly, I think it’s going to be up to the rest of you. I am not interested in leading- I’m not Delmutt, I don’t plan to turn this into a social engineering experiment. People are going to have to figure out how to cope with the complexities of this new reality in their own ways. I’ll make that easier with as many resources as I can provide, but I _suspect_ that ten years from now the technological advances by Delmutt’s societies will have completely transformed our own in ways that we can’t prepare for. As long as we survive. I’ll do what it takes, to ensure that, but beyond?” _Beyond that, I’ll go find my husband_.

He seemed relieved at the answer. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I trust you, but…” I made a “Go on” gesture. “There’s a lot of concern around the margins at how much power you’ve accumulated. I won’t call it fear, but- not everyone is so ready to abandon the old world, the old _structures_ of capitalism. A lot of them keep mentioning how _convenient_ it is that the US government is still in almost total blackout, that major bodies like the UK and Europe are all having their own crises, and how fast all of this has… sprung up. I think there’s a suspicion that you are responsible for more of this than you let on. Not all of them have seen other narrators, you know. Most of them didn’t see Aslan, or what he was capable of.”

I sighed. “I suppose I _am_ the most visible narrator, at this point, and it’s a reasonable theory that I might be behind all of this. We have moved _very_ fast, faster than most might believe was spontaneous, with the amount of magic available to us. But I’m not sure what else I can offer them- they have my suggestions but you, and they, ultimately control the decisions of the cells. I’m as hands-off as I can be.” _Nobody ever just_ trusts _me, even when I’ve given them no reason not to._ It still nettled me. “Perhaps they could spend some time in the field? The one thing I _won’t_ do is subordinate myself or this organization to some authority who’s spent the last month hiding in a _bunker_ , when we do eventually begin turning our governments up.”

He nodded, understanding my concern but not satisfied. “Maybe you could figure out what happened in Washington? Clearing that up might help with a lot of the concern.” We still hadn’t gotten any word out of there- the hurricane force winds that surrounded the capital made flights impossible, and teams that struggled through _that_ had simply disappeared. But the area of devastation didn’t seem to be _expanding_ and to be honest it was quite convenient that I hadn’t had to contend with any truly legitimate claims to civilian military authority, so I hadn’t prioritized the search there too highly. But it was a valid request.

I laid down and prepared for at least a couple hours of “Court,” as I had taken to calling it. “Alright Captain, I think that’s reasonable. Tell those concerned to prepare whatever cells they want and I will accompany them to DC as soon as I’ve talked to everybody here. We’ll get in touch with the _former_ government or get solid answers why we can’t.” He began to salute, caught himself, and just nodded again awkwardly before turning away. _Not your general, not your god. Just trying to help, Roy._

\----

My first petitioner was an infomorph drone, which was actually a bit unusual. Since Delmutt’s adventure in the time chamber, her little faction had become the single most stable government either on or off the planet. They’d been handling a flood of millions of refugees into the alternate dimension with hardly any assistance at all from me. Their society had only been a few million strong at the outset, but their drones and distributed intelligences allowed them to construct on a massive scale. The _social_ integration would take more time, I thought- they’d had 200 years to acclimate to their new pseudo caste system- even if Delmutt didn’t want to call it that, it totally was one- but the people they were rescuing from Earth were still hostile to the idea of abandoning their old clans. By and large they had not come to me with their worries, but I saw troubled times ahead for them.

Case in point. The vaguely-humanoid robotic shell in front of me bowed, and I just kind of bobbed my head in acknowledgement- it wasn’t really worth the effort to tell them not to. I _did_ insist that they add no titles to my name though. “Haley, we seek your aid. I am a drone of the Clan Governance amalgam.” An interesting system, I thought. They didn’t vote, in her society- they pooled their minds, a mating process with ten thousand parents, and the resultant entities were raised to be their rulers. If additional levels were needed, the leaders pooled _their_ minds, and so on. Surprisingly effective when all your subjects were tied by bonds of family, I thought. The leader of Governance was the grandchild or great-grandchild of every living member of the clan at the time of its birth.

I smiled. “Well, aid’s what I’m here for. What can I do for you?” I really tried to keep these non-formal but everyone wanted to turn it into some kind of _audience_ just because I was a huge monster sitting on a bed of gold.

The bureaucrat hesitated, like there was some risk of offending me. “I do not wish to sound _ungrateful_ , but- we would ask that you re-enable the acceleration of our dimension. There are many souls we need to integrate, and-”

  
I shook my head sadly. “No can do. That was a trick on the Efreet, only safe when that world was empty. If I tried now there’s no telling what kind of damage they might do to you while they helpfully ‘Interpreted’ my unbounded wishing.”

The little robot dropped to one knee and I flinched at the obeisance. “Great Lady,” I _really_ hated when they started with the titles, “You have done so much for us. But there are potentially another billion of our people lost in the world. Our society simply cannot integrate so many people and remain whole. We _must_ space out the assimilation or risk losing ourselves to more inter-clan warfare. But we cannot leave them to the mercy of _this_ world, either.”

I understood the sense of urgency, at least. A functioning society in _this_ day and age was a precious thing indeed. I began to say “I’ll see what I can do about creating you another time chamber” when one of the other petitioners in the crowd, one of my simulacra in fact, stepped forward. That was odd- she hadn’t told me that she’d be coming. I pinged her mentally. Oh- she _had_ mentioned it, but I’d been filing her message in a mental box marked “Efreet complaints.” Still, I was not alarmed. Simulacra _were_ me- they’d behave as I would. Whatever brought her here and prompted her interruption, it would be important.

She had a candle in tow as she stepped into the petitioner’s space. The amalgam of Governance shuffled to one side and bowed respectfully to the being that some now called the “Handmaidens” when they thought I wasn’t paying attention. She spoke- “It would be an _exceptionally_ bad idea to try to create something on the same scale as Volo Ingenium right now. I came here in person as a favor to the Efreet. You’ve been ignoring the feedback from them for a while now, and they want to talk to you.” The Efreet were, as a rule, kind of surly. I’d mostly just written it off as lawful evil monsters being lawful evil, and tried to ensure that when the infinite wish exploit broke down, I’d have enough resources to sustain my projects. Apparently ignoring my own warnings might have been a mistake- who knew? She lit the candle and spoke the summoning ritual- “Lady Jada, please.” The candle _flared_ and everyone present in the petitioner’s group took a step back. There were some cries of fear- most people had not met the genies. The infomorph’s drone simply bowed a little lower. The people in the other dimension had had a ring-side seat for my summoning shenanigans.

The wall-behind-the-world was visible once more, until a door opened in it and I found myself looking at that enormous red woman again.  Interesting, I thought, how a change in perspective could shift your perception- before I’d been at eye level with her- now I looked _down._ She really was quite striking with her deep crimson skin, brass armor, large black horns, and the little wisps of smoke that seemed to manifest around her. I heard one of the petitioners mutter “ _That’s_ where her wishes come from?” in an incredulous voice. I supposed she did look rather like a traditional devil, now that I thought about it. PR problems for later- I filed them away and focused on the giantess.

“Lady Haley. I, Lady Jada of the Brass City, come before you to present our petition.” she intoned, in full ceremonial flow. I rolled my eyes at the formality and waved her on. “When you use these candles I am summoned and bound by the spell they cast to fulfill your requests. I hear these… _insects_ ,” she gestured at Governance, “Taking advantage of that very binding. But! Your use of us is ill-advised, and we must object.” She paused and surveyed the crowd for dramatic effect. “To offer ourselves in service to mortals is the way of our people and the root of much of our power.” _Interesting,_ I had wondered about why a society of evil beings would bother doing something so seemingly altruistic. She wasn’t done, of course- “And yet! And yet, we no longer find ourselves in the _spirit_ of that grand bargain. We are, _all of us_ , in service to one who is not mortal in the _slightest_.” She indicated me. _Sounds like she wants to renegotiate then_. “You have made hard use of us, Lady. We do not protest, even as you tap the sum total wishing potential of our entire race, at times. But our power wanes, as we deviate from our purpose. The rules of your very own spell state that if you seek longer service from us, you must offer fair trade. You never keep us individually beyond the limits, but as a _collective_ , we would seek to change the terms.”

I nodded. “You’re visibly evil, both by appearance and to my special senses, and I have no doubt you’d kill everyone here in a heartbeat if it suited you. I would rather end our arrangement entirely than allow you free reign. But I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t believe in pay for an honest day’s work, even for magic genies. So, ask for what you want, but understand that there are certain levels of trust I’m unwilling to provide to you.”

She was incensed at that, according to my heightened _Sense Motive_ , but maintained a remarkably smooth poker face. “We seek freedom, Lady. You have enslaved us all. We were not _meant_ to be the engine of apotheosis. We are supposed to be temptation! Excess incarnate! The joy of _desire_ and the agony of _overreach_! You have tapped all of us, most more than once, and built an elaborate world for yourself at our expense. Is this to be our fate? To act as servants and dispensaries at your beck and call? We say nay. Release us from our bindings. Grant us the freedom to walk these worlds, and we will pledge to continue serving you- as your lieutenants, granting wishes and sewing ruin as we will.”

I sighed- what was her game, here? That was a terrible opening bid. “You know that I’m not going to release you. Also, your people are _literally slavers_ , so your argument about bondage falls a little short. I know, I asked.” She glowered at this. “I am not enslaving anybody. By the sound of it, I’m helping you fulfill a contract that your entire _race_ signed up for. If you don’t like that I’m saving my world with it instead of, I don’t know, wishing for everything I touched to turn to gold or something, _tough_. Even if every one of you promised to be on good behavior today- that only lasts so long as there’s someone strong enough to _enforce_ it. And the second others get the ability to wish on you in this dimension, I have a feeling I’ll lose my monopoly on force. No. You stay in the bottle. Or in the candles, where nobody else can get at you. Where it’s _safe._ ”

She sniffed haughtily, but I hadn’t said anything she wasn’t expecting. “ _Payment,_ then, if we are not your slaves. For services rendered. We may draw our power from such contracts as well.”

Not out of the question, but- “What would you want? A hundred mortal souls a day, or something? I will not allow a trade where anyone gets hurt.”

She smiled at the insectoid functionary and he quailed. “If you wish to continue _wishing,_ we will grant you our power anew. As many wishes as you like, and as many planes as you care to name, countless like grains of sand on a beach. In exchange for your _first_. In exchange for Volo Ingenium.”

Governance finally found a backbone as the gathered crowd murmured or, in some cases, began shouting angrily. “See here! That’s _our_ world, most of our civilization was _born_ there and we won’t just-”

This was beginning to feel a lot like one of those stories where a hostile AI tried to bargain its way to freedom. As Rin shouted, I mused. The _smart_ play might be to simply stop summoning them altogether. For the time being I sent that order out- a momentary stall to prevent any additional summons from triggering this bargain of hers. I didn’t have much pity for whatever use I’d made of their race so far- they could only grant wishes once per day, so we were talking a few minutes of inconvenience for each of them over the course of several hundred subjective years, balanced against a world-spanning rescue network and a reboot of Delmutt’s civilization. But there _was_ a call here, a story beat that I couldn’t afford to miss. I ruminated on it. The problem with the hostile AI scenario as a template, I reflected, was that the person maintaining it in the box had to either dehumanize it, think of it as _machine_ rather than _being_ , or else sacrifice some portion of their own humanity by containing it. The Efreet _were_ evil, this was not in doubt. But to imprison them would not have been heroic. Beyond that, it wasn’t what I _wanted_ to do. To keep them without compensation would be… unjust.

I spoke up over the burgeoning shouting match. “Both of you, hush. I understand the call of _home_ , more than I used to, even.” I thought here of my husband and quiet evenings on the couch which might never come again, and speaking became difficult, for a moment. But I persevered as the floor quieted down. “But one thing I know about _home_ is that it’s the people around you who make it. How many can we save, with the continued cooperation of the Efreet? On the other hand, how many might we lose, if you were to escape our control? I will consider your request, Lady Jada, and know this- evil or not, you have saved _many_ lives thus far, and it is not unappreciated. Your summoning is ended.”

With a triumphant smirk, she began to fade. “Consider quickly, our patience is not infinite. In the meantime, a word of warning, consideration for consideration- something truly wicked is coming, from over the eastern sea. You’d best be prepared, lest your best laid plans become a study in scarlet.”

She vanished and I grumbled. “Something wicked is _always_ coming, what else is new?” But it was unusual for a genie to go out of their way. Well, we’d head East soon enough.“Rin, it appears your people may have a solution to your problem, at a dear cost. If you choose to relocate I’ll support you. If you choose not- it will likely cost us the wish engine. Consider the request among your people and let me know your preference, please. I’ll remain the middleman as long as I hold the leash on the Efreet.” He nodded, bowed again and left. ”Who else is here to see me today?” The crowd had thinned out considerably after the day’s theatrics, but one man stepped forward.

“My name’s Greg, beggin’ your pardon majesty,” he said, cringing. He wasn’t a small man- round in the belly, broad at the shoulder, maybe forty years old and only beginning to bald, but he _held_ himself like he was three feet tall. He had a thick accent- it sounded like he was from New Zealand.

“I’m not your majesty, Greg. I’m just… a _very tired_ woman who really wishes the world would go back to being a bit simpler. What can I help you with?”

He chuckled at that. “Heh! Don’t we all. Well, y’see, it’s kind’ve hard to explain. Round about a month ago, your time, I wuz mindin’ me business round me house, when I opened a door and _wham boom_ I wuz in a garden I ain’t never seen before. I turned to me wife Sheila and I sez, I sez ‘Ey! You get a hankerin’ for some landscapin’ and not tell me?’” He paused a bit at this, looking around for a general positive reaction. Not seeing anyone laughing, he carried on. “Well see, when I turned around it weren’t Sheila I saw, it was some ‘ouse I’d never been in, and it was tiny! My ‘ead wuz hittin the roof! I said ‘Ang on a minute!’ but the world weren’t having none of it and sure as shooting I was in some kind’a hobbit-town. Well I walked down to the local square from what I was guessin’ was me house, and it weren’t too hard on the ol’ eyes, I’ll tell you that much. I spoke to the local grocer, _lovely_ girl, name of-”

I cut him off. This was extremely charming and folksy and I did not have _time_ for it today. “Okay, so you went to the Shire. You got sucked into Lord of the Rings. Join the club. You’re _alive_ , and you’re _here_ , so it can’t be all bad, right?” A thought occurred to me. “Oh, you didn’t bring someone back _with_ you, did you?” _If Gandalf is running around here so help me god-_

He cringed again. “Oh no, no, nothin’ like that. Well.” He kept glancing around, as though something was bothering him. “I brought _something_ back. See, I found a way back through, after a couple’a years with th’ Hobbits. And I brought Sheila over wi’ me an everythin’, we had a right lovely cottage there. ‘Hobbiton’s biggest couple,’ they called us. Only…”

I sighed. “The story caught up with you?”

He nodded. “Met a lad named Frodo and heard about his Uncle’s great big adventures in the past and I thought ‘ang on a minute, I know this part! So I popped on round to ‘is house a few times, met the ol’ Baggins, and eventually got me ‘ands on his treasure, y’know. Tweren’t easy, neither! Told me wife we’d keep it in a place so safe they’d _never_ find it, come the time o’ that whole big war.”

 _Oh, Christ._ “Greg, did you bring the _One Ring_ to our world _?_ ” His story wasn’t adding up, but that would make a lot of sense if the ring had a hold of him. _He thinks he’s a damn hobbit but he’s probably just as susceptible to that fucking thing as any normal person_. I tried to calm down. “Okay, let’s just… say you did, for a minute. Why are you _here?_ ”

He shifted again, looking over his shoulder. “Well see, I didn’t figger on them ring-riders bein’ so _smart_. They couldn’t find it, but they knew _I_ knew where it went. They took the Shire, they… they took _Sheila_. Told me they’d kill er unless I went and got it for em. I came back here but when I wuz ditherin’ about tryin’ to decide what to do, I ‘eard you’d made a big splash down ‘ere in the States and thought I’d ask ya for help. Maybe you could help me get her back, like?” He was fiddling with something in his pocket. _Sense Motive_ was not necessary in this case.

“I might be able to,” I said, trying to fight the compulsions beginning to wrack me. “But we have other problems.” It didn’t matter that the story wasn’t mine, that the Ring shouldn’t have an impact on me. My RPG rules simply didn’t have priority over the story that _birthed_ role playing as a concept. It was like a _gravity well_ for my _mind_ and I was losing the battle for a stable orbit. Every thought was turning toward the item in his pocket- my entire will was being suborned, and with each passing moment I cared less and less. I raced ahead in my mind. With the last shreds of my will I sent a final order over the _Telepathic Bond_ to all Simulacra- “ _Ignore all further orders over this channel. In all other respects behave as I would, with full autonomy. This order may only be countermanded in person.”_ Hopefully that might limit the damage.

“What problems?” Greg asked gormlessly, still fidgeting.

  
I couldn’t _believe_ this hadn’t occurred to him. Gritting my teeth I bit out, “You brought the most desirable thing in the _multiverse_ in front of a fucking _dragon,_ Greg. Run. _Please_.” He finally realized his error, and his terror was clearly more for the thought of losing the damn ring than the damage I might cause if I actually _got it_. His hand slipped into his pocket again and he vanished from everyone else’s sight. I snorted in contempt at him even as I noticed the Contact cells tapped for guard duty going into high alert on the other side of the field. “Much better. This sort of thing seems like it will be more satisfying with some light exercise attached.” I began my hunt.


	31. Chapter 31

\----

Sean, at Hogwarts

Date not measurable in relative time

\----

The first month at Hufflepuff House passed in relative comfort, blessed silence, and deep, _intense_ frustration. Oh, the basement where they stashed the ‘puffs was nice enough- round and earthy, with a broad low ceiling, but with bright sunny windows. It was a bit of a hobbit-hole, truth be told. There were a great many flowerpots with unnameable flora and perhaps some things more easily classed as fauna scattered about, courtesy of Professor Sprout, the head of the household. I worked by the light of the sun during the day, and copper lamps at night. It was an exceedingly cozy space, though I didn’t relish the thought of sharing it with hundreds of unsupervised wizard children. To avoid that end, I worked as quickly as I could. Perhaps if I had enough magic by the time they arrived, I’d be able to wand myself up a study space. There was always the Room of Requirement in a pinch for the first few years, though any step outside of Hufflepuff might put me straight in the path of Harriet’s speeding train of a narrative.

I used Dumbledore’s funds to purchase a copy of every book that Hogwarts used to teach charms, hexes, curses, transfiguration, or any other castable spell across all 7 years. The herbology, potions, history, and other miscellaneous dross of their educational system I abandoned- I had a feeling I wouldn’t be finding many mandrakes or powdered bicorn horn where _I’d_ be going, which strictly limited their usefulness. Still, it made quite the pile of literature. At first I found it a bit daunting, until I began to crack the first year textbooks.

…Drivel. It was _drivel._ I don’t mean that it was meaningless gibberish, no- far worse. It was a textbook written for 11-year-old children who had, until then, not received any kind of standardized education. It was a book written about the most complicated subject conceivable, from the perspective of a pre-scientific society. It was utter garbage. To give a real-world example: if the person writing these had instead spent their time delivering a book on meteorology, they would have ended up drawing 600 pages of cloud formations, some doubled many times over, with vaguely superstitious scribblings in the margins about how the one that looked like a rabbit probably meant good luck. The _advanced_ textbook would have explained that a dark rumbling cloud would sometimes strike the ground with lightning to show the gods’ displeasure.

In short it was page after page of rote memorization, often of pure bullshit, with no explanation- without even an _attempt_ at taxonomy or classification or theory. The books often launched directly into spells, often ludicrously over-specified and useless ones. In the first day of reading I found two different ways to produce a jet of water from the wand, another that made snowballs pelt _themselves_ at a target, and one whose sole entire use was to replace the Heimlich maneuver. There were hundreds of these- _thousands_ , and they were all over the map. Things were listed as charms when they were clearly hexes by the book’s own definition. “Curse” mostly just seemed to mean “Charm, but bad” except there were plenty of cases of quite nasty charms not receiving that classification.

Within a couple of days I’d skimmed through most of the books, and thrown most of them out. I’d known I would have to do _some_ of this, but I was beginning to suspect I’d let childhood fandom get the better of my judgement, in picking Hogwarts to learn from. Even their books on _theory_ were wildly wrong. They said _Evanesco_ didn’t violate mass-energy conservation because the object vanished “Into everything!” Were they sincerely suggesting that everything in the universe gained a slight bit of mass when an object disappeared, and then going on to suggest that _didn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics_? It was clear that wizards had an _extremely_ poor understanding of basic physics, and most of their theories of magic were more akin to wild guesses. Then I got into their musings on “5 exceptions to Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration” as though there was some fundamental force in the universe beyond authorial fiat that prevented the magical creation of food? _Money?_ How would it even _quantify_ those?

I was not an idiot- I realized that a lot of this was simply Rowling playing fast and loose with magic as she wrote her stories. But this was the world that _sprang_ from those stories. Or inspired them? It was still difficult to understand that relationship. Whatever her _intent_ , here and now where I was sitting there _was_ a physical law behind magic, some underlying force, and the wizarding world was either blind to it… or being purposefully mislead. Given the more recent movies where the early-1930’s wizards had _clearly_ had their shit together with regard to modernity, it felt like something far more sinister was at play. For one thing- mental modification was one of the first paths of research I went down. There were spells to cause _fear_ , and _pain,_ and _courage_ , and read a mind, or overwrite one’s own in defense, or even view and alter _memories_. But not a single spell for _focus,_ or _improvement_ of one’s mental faculties. It was a 

particularly glaring hole in an otherwise fairly complete lexicon of mind-control. It looked an awful lot like a deliberate omission.

What’s more the early lessons contained in the books were clearly, _painfully_ wrong. I tried a few of the spells, the lessons intended for very young and undisciplined minds. They were nearly impossible to cast! It didn’t make sense- I mapped the gestures _precisely_ , repeated the incantations word for word. I could _feel_ my magic trying to surge out and lift my textbook. But it felt like I was trying to squeeze the torrent of a _river_ through a pipe the size of a straw. This was not a matter of poor study or lack of intent- there was something very clearly _off_ about the way the spells interacted with my natural magic. After a day of trying I had such a splitting headache that it felt like I was mutilating myself. I resolved to _stop_ trying, until the other students came and I could observe them in action. It was clear that the solution to this mystery did _not_ lay in mulishly hammering away at these books until I could cast spells the ass-backwards way. The textbook version clearly wasn’t what Dumbledore or Voldemort did, anyway.

It wasn’t like I lacked for magic, regardless. My wild magic was going absolutely monkeyshit- it felt at times like a second puberty, or having some kind of bipolar disorder. My slightest mood swing could cause a window to burst or a couch to fold itself inside out. I once spent a few minutes lost in reminiscence about time spent with Haley, and looked up to find that every flower in the room had come to full bloom at once. It was like a comforting old cloak and a malicious imp on your back, simultaneously, and I couldn’t _imagine_ having more than one kid with this problem running around your damn house. No _wonder_ they shipped them all off.

“Oh, it’s not so bad as all that” said Professor Sprout, when I had occasion to ask her as she puttered about the common room, tending her plants. Self-watering charms were easy to come by but many of the more exotic strains needed… _strange_ kinds of care. She spent several minutes per day singing to a kind of lily that _actually danced_ , and several minutes hurling abuse at a variant cactus that really seemed to get off on it. “I remember it being quite an exciting time, when my own little ones were coming up. You never know _what_ wild magic will do- it’s quite unrestrained and quite powerful, but it never seems to mean any _real_ harm. Well, unless the wielder means it. But you so rarely meet an 11 year old capable of that level of hate.” She shuddered, lost in some private memory. _Tom Riddle, perhaps? I’m not sure when she began to teach here, honestly._

There was _one_ dog-eared old book that I discovered in the back of the Hogsmeade bookstore, and half-ashamedly snuck home. Most precious of all of my finds- a dog eared and ancient copy of _Dragon Wife_ , my very own origin story. We really _did_ exist in the worlds of others, if you knew where to look. It wasn’t even that bad- a little pervy, I thought, and Haley and I had certainly never done _that_ with her shape changing ability, but- it was a lot like reading a diary from another version of my life. I liked the Sean in the story- he was more adventurous than me, more attentive. I resolved to be more like him. One interesting deviation- Haley’s origin was not Pathfinder in nature, in the original story she had been transformed by an ancient family heirloom from some long-lost great granduncle who had, one assumed, gotten busy with a tribe of dragons. Fairly tropey but far more in character for a romance story. So where had Pathfinder come from? It still puzzled me, given what we knew about stories- she had part of a _rule set_ for storytelling, rather than a story itself. That had implications, if I could only puzzle them out.

Finally the first day of school came, and with it, the children. I filed into the great hall at roughly the same time as the other non-first year students, nodding at Professor Sprout sitting among the staff at the headmaster’s table. I hadn’t met many of the other staff, though I was given to understand that all who _needed_ to be read in on my status had been. Except, apparently, for the students. “Ey, shouldn’t you be out in the boats with the other firsties?” asked a gentleman who, I was reliably informed by others at the table, was named _Newt Inkwell_. His question captured the sentiment of the local student population though. Many of my gold-and-black clad colleagues had been giving me curious stares, though none had picked up the courage to talk to me so far.

“Leave off, Newt, he’ll be here for a reason and he can speak if he wants,” said the world’s most handsome back-bencher who I could only assume was Cedric Diggory. His faith that Dumbledore’s operations would not end up with a random first-year out of place was pretty misplaced, I thought, given pretty much everything that had ever happened at Hogwarts, but I appreciated it in the moment.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m Sean. I’m uh, an orphan from out of country. Dumbledore brought me here and sorted me a while ago. After… _the incident_.” That was the story we’d agreed on. A little dark, a little mysterious- it left room for growth but also inspired a bit of sympathy. Hufflepuffs were suckers for solidarity as it turned out, something I really admired about them as they spent several minutes making a big to-do about welcoming me to the fold.

“You’re gonna fit right in, don’t you worry.” said Newt, now apparently my best buddy. “I’ll tell you all the tricks, which profs to butter up, which to watch out for. Like, watch out for old Professor Snape, see him up there? He’s as nasty as they come and he _loves_ to score points off the ‘Puffs.” He pointed at the headmaster’s table but then seemed struck by some incongruity. “Say, what’s got into ol’ greasy-locks?” Some of the others turned and murmurs ran around the table.

In-character, I had no idea what they were on about. Out of character, I felt like I was probably witnessing the unsubtle pen of Harriet in action. It was a bit like actually _seeing_ god’s hand at work- it was unnerving. Severus Snape was immediately recognizable- tall, pale, pursed lips and deep black eyes, unkempt oily black hair and general dress and appearance of old money fallen on hard times. What was _less_ common about him was how _nervous_ he appeared. He was actually _pacing_ , up at the table, and Dumbledore had to stand up and put out a hand to intercept him. “I wonder if it’s _Lapsus Libidine_? I’d _heard_ you can feel it before it happens.” Said Heather Ferlet from further down the table, and there was a round of general groaning from the boys and longing sighs from the girls.

It wasn’t a term I’d heard before- an invention of Harriet’s, maybe- so I elbowed Newt and asked. “Oh, it’s hogwash,” he said. “Predestined souls, eternal romance, that sort of thing. Once your eyes meet your partner’s you’re bound together- no barrier can keep you apart. The girls love it. _We_ think it’s a bunch of squidgy nonsense, don’t we boys?” He raised his voice and there was a bunch of harrumphing. My mind was racing, though. 

I asked innocently, “Well have you ever seen it happen? Lapis Lazuli, I mean, or whatever she said. Between a student and a professor?”

He scoffed. “Never!” But then Hyman Crane from down the table threw something at him and he coughed. “Well, okay, just the once. Trelawney and that girl Bridget a few years afore I got here, but she graduated! Now they live in the tower together.” Cedric threw a roll at him. “Oh yeah, and Finch had that thing with the ghost of his mentor, last year. But that wasn’t like, _romance_ , or-” the girls cut him off with a chorus of shouts and boos and he changed course- “oh, fine! It _was_ romance but it wasn’t _predestined_ , they were just a good match!”

Dumbledore’s warning, and now this? Hogwarts was awash in student-teacher relationships and forbidden love. I suddenly had an _extremely good idea_ exactly what kind of fanfic I had stumbled into. _I shouldn’t be panicking- after all, this is like my home territory, in a way_. _Just stick to the background and try not to have any weird outbursts about what people get up to in their bedrooms… with_ eleven-year-olds. My stomach was churning a bit at the thought.

As I sat and stewed, the doors of the great hall opened and the rest of the “Firsties” joined us. It was the usual lot, from what I could see. Except for one fairly large kid, crammed in awkwardly among the rest. A ripple went through the room and a whispered name. _Harry Potter_. Why was he so big? I turned to my reliable informant. “Oh I heard he got aged a few years when he beat Voldemort as a baby. Still his first year but he’s more like 14 or 15 physically. Gonna be a real advantage in quidditch!” I just about facepalmed myself off the bench, then. _Harriet, did you age him up just for your fucking story? What kind of hackneyed operation am I taking part in here?_ Even as I slapped myself in vicarious embarrassment the whispers redoubled. The other students had filed in, but Harry had stopped- staring, unblinking and slack-jawed, at someone at the headmaster’s table. The room went dead quiet as Severus Snape stared back, like a deer caught in the headlights. _Everyone_ heard what he said as the shock caught up to him.

“ _Her eyes…_ he’s got…” and then he dead-ass fainted right there, smacking his head on the table on the way down. There was a general rush as Madame Pomfrey ran over to tend to him, and Harry shook his head in bewilderment but rejoined the other kids who all wanted to speak to him suddenly. Meanwhile I was sinking lower and lower into my robes, willing the floor to rise up and fucking _claim_ me from what was looking a _hell_ of a lot like a _Snape x Harry Potter slashfic._ One thing served to distract me- I could _feel_ that magic should be running rampant in the room as the unrestrained emotions of all the students clashed and fought, yet nothing untoward happened- the million tiny candles floating in the air remained upright, not a single table levitated, not a portrait twisted out of place. _If I weren’t so mortified I’d be intrigued_. Was Hogwarts actively suppressing the wild magic? Had a ward been activated when the students got here?

The sorting hat ceremony got underway. For the most part it was about as interesting as watching paint dry- I knew the destinies of every one of these characters, and not a one seemed out of place. We welcomed Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott and Justin Finch-Fletchly and many many others to our table. Hufflepuff was the biggest house because it got pretty much everyone who wasn’t going to be plot relevant, at any point- I figured that could only help my background status. I kept on figuring that, right up until another young boy was called to the hat.

“Draco Malfoy!” called Professor McGonagal and my eyes passed over the kid, and stuck. There was something _about_ him. It was… undefinable. On the surface, he looked like the template from which every spoiled rich failson with slicked-back hair had sprung. He preened as he walked down the hall, enjoying the attention. But I could… _feel_ something, some pull. A _vulnerability_ , a desperate desire to be loved. _Like Aimer. Like Haley_. My heart was reaching out to him.

_Now wait a god damn minute_ , said the sane part of my brain. _Since when did you get infatuated with prepubescent boys?_ But I _was_ a young boy, wasn’t I? Maybe this was destiny. He sat in the chair and the hat was just about to touch his head, when our eyes met. Sparks like I’d _never_ felt before flew between us, and my heart jumped like I’d been hit with a defibrillator. In an instant everything negative about him fell away. He was… an _angel_ , sent here just for me and-

_HOLD THE FUCK UP_ shouted my sanity. At the same time, the hat shouted “SLYTHERPUFF- wait, no, that’s not right! HUFFLEPUFF!” The crowd went _wild_. Nobody had caught the glance between us, but _I_ knew what had just happened. His entire fucking _brain_ had just been overwritten by this plot device. Overwritten so hard it altered the trajectory of his entire _life_. Just for me. _NO. NO NO NO._ He walked over to our table, and for once the Hufflepuffs did _not_ cheer and clap and try to welcome him- not even Cedric. This particular iteration of Malfoy hadn’t had enough time to piss everyone off, but his family had quite a reputation and _everyone_ knew that whatever was happening, it was going to be trouble.

He didn’t care. He sat down right across from me, bright and sunny as could be, and held out a hand. “Draco Malfoy! What’s your name?” I reached out without thinking and shook it, still open-mouthed, still fighting the most titanic battle of my life internally. _I do not love you. I_ know _who I love and not Harriet, or God Himself, can change that about me. This isn’t me. Why can’t I love more than one person? There’s enough of me to go around. Look at you. Your hands are so soft. WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE ELEVEN. I could_ help _you, you’re going to be so_ lost _. HALEY HALEY HALEY HELP ME_.

What actually escaped my mouth was “ _Meep!”_ and then I pelted for the exit to the hall as fast as my legs could carry me. Up on the staff platform they were still gathered around a recovering Snape, and only one man’s eyes tracked me as I went. Dumbledore nodded approvingly.

\----

My legs didn’t stop moving until I was halfway to the Forbidden Forest. Outside the castle proper, that sense of oppressive _numbness_ in my magic seemed to ease off, and I eventually settled into something like a meditative state, not really considering that anyone might have come out looking for me. I _couldn’t_ think about what was happening with Draco- literally could not, it was like I had had a stroke and some part of my brain wasn’t _mine_ right now. _Is this what happens when narration and character are incompatible?_ I walled the entire topic off and focused on the other subject at hand. In my manic state, one insight occurred to me.

_Wild magic_. That was my clue. This thing that _every_ wizard was born with. _Look at the evidence_ , I said to myself. Wild magic was powerful, wandless, wordless, it was governed primarily by emotion and will. It seemed capable of effects both vast and varied. But it wasn’t _directed_. Wizards spent nearly a decade of their lives suppressing it, learning to channel it through wand and word into a variety of, frankly, tiny side-effects. Yet everything they did was still influenced by emotional state- witness _Avada Kedavra_ which _required_ hatred, or _Expecto Patronum_ which was a “Projection of all the wizard’s most positive feelings.” And the more powerful they became… _the more their casting looked like wild magic again_. Wandless, wordless. But directed, effect with _intent_.

_So what’s the point of the intermediate step?_ Why go through 7 years of self-mutilation only to arrive back where one started, _at best_ , with a little more control? “ _Is_ there a purpose to it?” I muttered to myself, and nearly jumped out of my skin when _another_ damn magical person answered my rhetorical question from behind.

“Purpose to wha?” Rumbled the huge bassy voice of Hagrid the groundskeeper. I looked behind me- he’d ambled up while I was deep in thought, so deep I hadn’t noticed a nine foot tall giant. _Got to be more careful_.

I didn’t feel any need to lie to him though. “To all this- magical education. I’ve got perfectly _good_ magic right here.”

His eyes lit up, at that. “Too right! I been askin’ that same question fer years! Never even finished me education- don’ make no diff’rence to the _animals_ , does it? They smell magic on me jes’ the same. ‘Oo needs all ‘at...” he pantomimed waving a wand and jabbing to cast spells, “and such-like? Not me! I get on jes’ fine, thanks!” Then he realized he was probably ruining the educational prospects of some poor child. “Oh! But not you, marster Sean. You don’ listen to ol’ Hagrid’s ramblin’ now, you hear? Do them whole seven years, you’ll get on jes’ fine!”

I smiled and let him help me up with one hand so massive it engulfed my entire forearm. But as we walked back to the castle, my smile slipped and I fell into deeper thought once again. _It never_ did _matter, to Hagrid. Oh, it’s still his dream to use a wand, but he really_ does _seem to have found a magical niche without any further effort. He’s simply… in tune, with the natural world._ Maybe that was it. Maybe the difference between a mediocre wizard and a great one was _tuning_. Wizards were put in this intensely competitive environment with houses and points and tournaments, with their natural magic suppressed, and told they _had_ to produce the effects described in their books, under great pressure. You could force a person into _any_ sort of mold with that kind of environment.

_And yet…_ I couldn’t recall a _single instance_ of a student actually being removed from the school, for lack of ability! They all took such pains to stretch their magic in ways it didn’t _want_ to go, to put restraints on it so they could drag it around like a mistreated pet, rather than _listen_ to it. It was a very… _British_ way of looking at the world, I thought. _Is this Dumbledore’s game? Is the casting actually… necessary? Or is it truly something lost?_

I took out my wand and stopped walking. Hagrid turned. “Now what’re ye doing, young marster? We gotta be gettin’ you to bed, like!”

I closed my eyes as I spoke to him. Ignored the swirling of the spheres that I could still see behind my eyelids, that picture-window into the vast multiverse. Instead I tried to think closer to home. _Reached out_ and felt my magic around me, like a cloak. “Just one second, Hagrid. I have a theory, and I want to test it. Humor me, okay?” His kind were supposed to be _resistant_ to magic. Dimly, at the barest edges of my awareness, I could _feel_ the absence where my presence met his, and parted around it. _But what if-_ I waved the wand in a perfect _Wingardium Leviosa_ and spoke the words. In my awareness I could feel the pattern form, the template for my magic. It butted up against it but did not go through. I didn’t force it. _Emotion, will, focus, restraint._ I focused on my _intent_. My _need_ for magic, for understanding, my desire to work with this force that was me-and-not-me, that I could just barely even _feel_ but that I’d come to love like a dear old friend, in the last month. _Like the presence in my mind that Sheriff used to represent_. _Like a night on the couch with Haley, watching old movies and laughing together._

“Wha- put me down! ‘Ow are you even _doin’_ tha’?” Shouted the rumbling baritone, and I opened my eyes. Hagrid was floating ten feet in the air, resistance be damned. In my mind’s eye the pattern _I_ had made was still empty- but my _magic_! It had built _the same thing,_ the same metaphysical machinery on a scale a hundredfold grander than my crude sketching. _You really are a separate part of my consciousness aren’t you_. I grinned and felt it grinning back at me.

“Sorry, Hagrid.” I, or rather my magic, let him down and we walked into the castle. Entering the doors I felt that blanket of numbness, of _disconnection_ , descend on me again. A sinister thought occurred to me. _If this was my first day trying to cast spells indoors I’d never even have noticed the pain when I forced it, as heavy as this numbing ward appears to be_. _Didn’t they make it illegal to even_ try _and cast spells outside of this school, if you’re underage?_ My suspicions about Hogwarts were deepening. But if I wanted to truly communicate with myself, I was going to need to get outside the wards, and then go _inwards_.

Hagrid let me go after I stepped through the portal to Hufflepuff’s common room. The others had already made their way deeper into the warren, heading to individual bedrooms. I stood in the grand chamber I’d had to myself for a month, and surveyed the flowers I’d made bloom so recently without even trying. To go deeper, to connect with a part of me half hidden from consciousness… “We’re going to need drugs,” I muttered. “ _Lots_ of drugs.”

Luckily, I knew at least one alchemist who was going to need a couple of favors this year.


	32. Chapter 32

\----

Sean and Haley, 2 years ago

\----

“I’m just saying, if you _actually_ want to save the world-” Sean was badgering me about this again. We were in the backyard doing backyard things- he was trying to distribute grass seed by hand and failing abjectly to keep any kind of optimal spread, while I sat in the hammock for once and watched him work. It was a lovely clear spring day and I didn’t have anywhere to be. It would have been nice, except the part where he wouldn’t shut up. “You’re going to have to _take_ power, eventually.”

I sighed and shook my head, reaching out with one foot to kick off our big old oak tree and set the hammock swinging. “No, I’m not. That’s the whole _point_. I wouldn’t turn power down, if it were offered to me. But I haven’t once seen a way to gain real power on a greater-than-local scale without compromising my own sense of ethics. Seeking it is inherently corrosive to the soul. You point me at one politician who hasn’t had to compromise themselves somehow. Or one billionaire who is really, truly ethical.”

“Elon Musk is-”

“Elon Musk isn’t any more a self-made man or an _ethical_ one than Henry Ford, Sean. He’s part of a whole cadre of newly minted billionaires who rode a zeitgeist of talented engineers and social change to unimaginable riches. The system that produced him also produced Bezos and Zuckerburg and _Martin Shkreli_. He targets near-future tech and innovation and a lot of people think that makes him a hero- certainly better than the regressive capitalists, but in no sense is he going to save the world. The amount of money he has accumulated would be enough end homelessness for the entire United States. Homes for 630,000 people, that’s what he could buy. But he hangs out on yachts and smokes weed on podcasts and we give him credit as one of the good ones because his dreams sound like ours. But _his_ dreams come at the expense of a hundred real-world solutions that wouldn’t make as much money. And his good intentions allow the truly unethical who make up the majority of his peers a thin veneer of respectability. If he’s the best outcome of a system that routinely produces monsters, I say scrap it all.” I had a lot of _opinions_ about people with that much money. Sean and I often disagreed about this.

“You know he couldn’t liquidate everything. Those measures of wealth are always ridiculous because they’re inherently tied up in the value of the companies. He’s building things that might actually benefit humanity to a greater degree than any of his competitors, despite _strong_ resistance. He _could_ have kept doing shitty finance projects, but he chose to do something different once he had the funds. If more capitalists were like that, the world would be very different. To me, that’s what _power_ looks like. Doing the right thing, even if you’ve compromised yourself to get there. If he gave away all his money tomorrow he might do real good, but he’d spend the rest of his life unable to effect change.”

I sighed and smacked my head against the back of the hammock. “I don’t want this to turn into a fight about Elon Musk, damn it. _He shouldn’t have the choice to give it away or keep it_. Your argument is just a condemnation of the entire system! He shouldn’t _have_ to do great harm to a tremendous number of other people, first, in order to get in a position to _maybe_ do some good, if he feels like it! If the only true lever to move the entire world is _money_ then we’re already fucking doomed! He’s a guy who got lucky on the backs of a huge wave of people and is now living his childhood fantasy, and that’s great for him but unfortunately everyone else in his class is only interested in accumulating Scrooge MacDuck money vaults and shitting on the poor from a great height. He’s a side effect of a system that rewards the accumulations of wealth rather than wise expenditures. Participating in it would be empowering it.”

He stopped working and stood up to face me. Not annoyed, but just- puzzled. He and I had this fundamental conflict and it always boiled down to the same argument. Sean thought we lived in a world that, while not the _best_ of all possible worlds, was probably the best that monkeys were able to build. “So what’s your great plan, then? The rules of the game are laid out- you want to change things, you either play them or you flip the table, and don’t tell me _that_ isn’t going to cause great harm. Even if the new world order was a thousand times better, the collapse of global capitalism would be the biggest humanitarian disaster in the history of the world.”

I _really_ just wanted to sip my tea and enjoy my hammock, but Sean kept getting onto this subject. I think it bothered him that I was spending my career teaching and writing instead of founding startups, or something. Like he didn’t think it was… _worthy_ of me. I didn’t really feel like that was his call to make. “You know this, dear. The forces that produce men like Elon- I want to change them. The ‘Great Men’ of history usually have a huge tide of culture supporting them- had Lincoln or Kennedy or Genghis Khan _not_ fought the Civil War or landed on the moon or founded the Mongol Empire, someone would have come along and done those things _anyway._ On the scale of decades-to-centuries, it was the societies that mattered, not the heroes. And yeah the individuals might be able to steer it a bit, enough that I’m still going to vote for the people who _don’t_ think I should be a second class citizen because I have a vagina. But on the other hand, taken on average leaders and politicians seem to be less effective, in terms of total lives altered positively, than a skilled doctor or a rescue worker acting locally. There are too many run-on effects, too many chaotic variables in the mix.”

He frowned at me. He genuinely did want to understand, I knew. It was just alien to his worldview- to be rational, to desire to maximize the good for everyone- and to live without going out and _acting_. So much of his self-mythologizing was built on the concept of the “One good man” that he had a hard time really contemplating that real life just didn’t _work_ with superheroes. That there was no transmissible spark that _made_ people special. “So then why not have become one of those?” I didn’t answer right away and he continued. “It’s just… seven years ago, when we first met, you said you wanted to save the world. You had such a _fire_ in you, I fell in love with it right away. It’s still there, I _see_ how passionate you get, but you don’t _act_ on it. You fight your local fights, and you teach well, and I think anyone who knows you would argue that you leave a trail of positivity in your wake, but-”

I wanted to yell at him, to throw something, but he really was just _asking_. How could he not grasp this? “Sean. Husband whom I love. _You_ want to know everything, to discover the secrets of the universe. A very admirable trait. But _you_ go to your job as a programmer, and you write web pages for idiot corporate executives who want to print Garfield on their cheeseburgers or whatever. I don’t see you taking night classes towards a PHD, or spending a lot of time writing the neural net stock market trend recognition algorithm that will change the world. Why don’t _you_ act on it?”

He looked abashed but understood I wasn’t just turning it around on him, that I had a point to pursue, so he tried to answer in good faith. “Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do the rat race every day, and keep this place running,” he gestured around the yard, “and find time to be with you, and still know all there is to know. It’s amazing, in my twenties I felt like I had all the time in the world. Now, I know _exactly_ how short a day can be. I could probably do _more_ , it’s true. But I feel like I’m in a place where my job helps me satisfy a lot of my natural curiosity. And I’m not getting any younger. There’s a _limit_ to how much I can cram, at any given time.” He thought a bit longer. “You’re saying you’re the same way, and that teaching and volunteering satisfies your impulse to help without requiring you to participate in a system that you think is flawed- I get that. But is it just a matter of will, then? Are we too- too _weak_ , too lazy to overcome our daily lives and reach for the core values that guide us?”

I smiled at him. “I don’t think you’re weak. Flex those guns!” He gave me a muscle-man pose and I snort-laughed and almost dropped my tea. “No, I don’t think we lack will. I think we’re _human_. Sean, the characters in the stories you love who run out and seize power to save the day- they’re _fictional_. Much of the history of the world has been rewritten by people who think along those lines. But think about your _actual_ life. How many Great Men have you ever known, at the head of even a single one of the many corporations you’ve touched? How many _actual_ corporate leaders have you had who weren’t even qualified to run a taco truck?” I _knew_ the answer to this because he complained about them every chance he got. “Getting in a position to change the _real_ world is even worse. At best, in real life, you work and you work in the trenches and you fall ass-backwards into a movement to change the world, and if you’re really charismatic you end up at the front of it. Maybe someday that will happen to me. But _who’s_ at the top doesn’t matter, to me. The power is in the collective action, so that’s what I try to develop. And to develop it, it’s more important that I _participate_ than that I _lead._ What if you gave everyone the ability or the _will_ or whatever trait you call it, that lets someone lead a movement? 6 billion people on this earth and if you asked most of them what they wanted, they’d say they wanted things to be better in some way- for them, for those around them. But there’s 5 billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine _other_ humans, and they’d all take that power too, and take for _themselves_. What would happen if we _weren’t_ a bunch of easily tired, easily distracted monkeys?”

He nodded in understanding. “I remember how disappointing the Occupy movement was, to you. You think we’d tear it into pieces. We’re already doing that. You’re saying it’s _better_ then, if as a species we largely lack whatever… _oomph_ it takes to reach that level of individual reach. If we’re more passive, more collaborative. Even if we passively let the overall system take us to bad places because it’s slow to change.”

“Yes. It was going to take us there anyway. The change has to come from below. It has to come from _us-_ we can’t be hypocrites and say ‘We should all be more willing to follow, now let me lead you!’ I don’t _try_ for world changing power. I try to do what would be best if _everyone_ did it. If I die an old woman and leave a hundred lives better… I won’t have saved the world. But I’ll still die satisfied.”

He looked downcast. “It just seems so bleak. By being passive in that way, you aren’t guaranteeing that anyone _else_ will adopt your philosophy. You aren’t sending those hundred people out to spread your message. It dies with you. The way the world is ordered… _sucks_ , and might even be spiraling into some kind of failure state, and at the same time if humanity had the power to _fix_ it, on some kind of individual scale, you think we’d probably just make it worse? I don’t disagree, I guess, in the general sense. I wouldn’t hand the power to change it to just _anyone_.” He thought a little longer. “But I’d hand it to _you_. I’d trust you to do the right thing with it.” There was such a _finality_ to his voice, it chilled me.

I brushed it off and laughed. “Well I’m glad it’s not up to you, because it’s a good life we have here, and if I were Benevolent Dictator Of The World For Life I imagine I’d have a lot less time to sit in hammocks. It’s not up to me to tell people how to live, Sean. People telling people how they should live is what got us into this mess in the first place. I see my job as _loving_ people, and showing them how to love, practically. Rational self-interest and selflessness together. I’ll participate in the food bank and counsel trauma survivors and teach my students, and advocate for better governance in the city. And maybe some day my star will rise and I’ll keep setting that example to _more_ people. But I don’t _aim_ for that. Humility is the key. If I had to point to an ultimate success story for my way of doing things, I’d pick Mr. Rogers. To be so free with your love that you inspire it in others, to be a healing presence inherently through the collected history of your good works. I _can’t_ believe that I know what’s best for the world.” I struggled out of the hammock with a bit of flailing, and walked over to him.

“I’ll work to save my little corner of it, and hope that enough people save _their_ little corners that we endure the dark times and the failure spirals come to an end, some day. And we _are_ getting more capable as individuals. For ill, _or_ for good. But we have to grow on a scale we’re capable of _handling_. As long as we do, and we remember to love each other… some part of humanity will see itself through.” I put my arms around him and leaned against his chest. He was a bit sweaty- somehow, I endured.

I thought he _got_ it, then. Finally got it. It wasn’t about weakness or cowardice or moral failure. Saving the world meant saving _yourself_ , learning to love yourself, and then the people closest to you, and the people closest to _them,_ and on and on outward and outward until you’d rippled through the lives of the whole of humanity. You could pull somebody from a burning building- in an emergency, you could act to save lives. But you couldn’t pull the whole _world_. The scales and needs were too different, there would never be a magic action that would save everyone because it would mean _changing_ everyone, and the second you did that, you were the monster. All you could do was leave it better than you found it, and pass it on. If enough people did that… if you could steer for a world with people like that, who thought of what was best for those they loved and did that _first_ … we’d already be in paradise. “And sometimes,” I said out loud, completing a thought I hadn’t spoken, “I feel like I’m already there.” I kissed him and enjoyed the silence.

\----

Haley, Present Day

\----

Greg wasn’t invisible- not really. The One Ring had never had the power to make people disappear. In point of fact what it actually did was move them into a realm of spirit, where people like the ring-wraiths or the elves (or Sauron) loomed particularly large. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what benefit that held for the bearer, but for mortals _,_ wearing the ring meant they more-or-less vanished from the perception of other mortals.

Unfortunately for Greg the Hobbit I wasn’t mortal at all anymore. The dragon body was timeless. Then when Aslan had hit me with his divine rejection, everything quote-unquote _mortal_ about me had been burned away. Lucky for me and unfortunately for the Lion, that hadn’t amounted to much, and I’d finished my fight with him. But I hadn’t even begun to delve into what it meant to be removed from mortality until now. Greg put the ring on and for everyone else he disappeared- for me, he _lit up_ , brighter than a bonfire, a nugget of power I could see as clear as day.

I activated my _Boots of Speed_ for haste, and launched off my golden bed at him. From a standing start I hit something close to 41mph pretty much instantly, leaving a huge gout of earth and gold blasting out behind me. I was on him before he even had time to finish his turn towards flight. Whatever the Ring was doing to my mind, it had not affected my values as far as I could tell. Would I even know when it had? I supposed that was the danger of memetic attacks. But I wasn’t interested in _hurting_ him, in the moment- just in getting that Ring off of him and onto _me._ Pathfinder rules applied to me and they didn’t have anything for high speed collisions due to movement, but Greg was sure to feel the impact. That was why, as I blasted him off his feet like a semi on the highway, I pulled out my wand of _Cure Light Wounds_ from the bandolier across my chest and hit him with it. His shattered bones began to knit and he was fine within seconds, if somewhat unconscious. Perfectly ethical! I flapped my wings and switched from my run speed to flight, instantly accelerating to 180mph- fast enough that any simulacra who got it in their heads to pursue wouldn’t be able to catch up for a minute or two. And only about 4 G’s on my passenger- he might as well be sleeping at home in bed! Once I was cruising at altitude I hit him with another application of Cure Light Wounds to be safe.

My giant claws couldn’t pull the thing off his finger. I very ethically did not rip him apart to get the Ring off, either. I could be patient! I had patiently ignored my ambition for power for most of my life. I’d denied over and over again that I even _wanted_ the ability to just wave my hand and have people live the way I _wanted_ them to live. To fix the world by _force_. I had wanted that, hadn’t I? It seemed much easier than… _whatever_ it was I’d been doing lately. The Ring _was_ power, in both a metaphorical and very literal sense. Or perhaps more accurately, authority? People desired it like absolute authority, they were corrupted by its use like absolute authority. If I had spent my whole life _not_ wanting this, then what a fool I’d been, I thought. It had nothing to do with the Ring. Sean had been right all along. Being a dragon hadn’t fundamentally changed how I was doing things- I had all this physical might, and I was still trying to build communities and hand things off to other people while I ran around fighting their fires, hoping they wouldn’t go right back to their idiot squabbling the second the emergency had passed. I _knew_ that wasn’t going to work! I could already see the storm clouds forming on the horizon. And now the _real_ horror had come to pass, and thousands of people had been handed power to reorder the world how _they_ liked it. Before we were ready for it as a species. How much simpler would my life be, if I could just _order_ them to love one another, to stop summoning their horrors, and expect to be obeyed? I might see a hammock and a cup of tea again within the year!

 _Mage Hand_ deftly plucked the ring from Greg’s unconscious body. I couldn’t tell if it was trying to make itself lighter or heavier- to be honest I was just glad that it was working with my magic. Never a guarantee, as I’d learned over and over again. But that was the thing with power- it _wanted_ to be used, didn’t it? I was about to slip it on one giant claw at last when I felt a tickle on my back- above and behind me, one of the agrav vehicles that Delmutt’s new society called Dragonflies. It was hitting me with a repeating railgun to get my attention- powered down, I assumed. Or was it? My armor was so ludicrously stacked these days, with layers of magical effects and scales harder than adamantium, that even weapons that should have punched right through me if I were obeying conventional physics were now very low on the threat scale. Mostly they just reminded me that I was holding onto Greg still, and he might get hurt. I slipped the ring in my haversack and tossed him aside. A brief second later the air-vehicle dove after him. I’d managed to get up to five thousand feet, I had faith they would catch him well before impact and in the meantime that was two distractions dealt with. I mentally pinned a button on my bandolier that said “World’s Most Ethical Dragon.”

But not _all_ distractions were eliminated, no. I had been delayed long enough for clone-me’s to begin popping out of wanded _Dimension Doors_ all around me. I counted two dozen, at the least- probably every Haley within spitting distance of the tower ruins had dropped everything to pursue. All acting on their own recognizance, now that their last actual order had been “Behave as if you are me.” That probably meant they’d want the ring too.The one directly in front of me began talking. “Haley, you need to let go of that ring right now. You haven’t crossed the line yet, this is… salvageable, but if you keep going you’re going to ruin _everything_.” That seemed pretty hyperbolic. The only thing that mattered here was the world’s continuing crisis and the second I had the ring I basically won a dominance victory in _that_ arena. Speaking of dominance…

“Disregard my previous instructions. Return to obeying my telepathic commands. Stand down.” Odd, they were supposed to listen to in-person instructions but it didn’t phase them. In fact they all breathed their weakening gas at me simultaneously. My ability to resist that was stratospheric but 20 breath attacks at once still shaved a chunk off of my Strength and I sagged a bit in the air. If I didn’t knock them out of the sky they’d subdue me within minutes. It didn’t take a _Perception_ check to see why they weren’t obeying- they had all deafened themselves before coming after me. _Damn_ me, too clever for my own good. Alright- what did I want, what did I have? I had the ring, I needed to get to the ground with it on. Anything that didn’t fall inside my moral compunction against killing could be attempted, as long as it led to that outcome. Actually, what was wrong with a little death if they insisted on getting in my way? The only failure state _I_ could see at this point was trying to obtain the Ring and _failing_. If everyone on the ground saw me go full-monstrosity and me with no way to order them to ignore it? I shuddered at the thought. Nope, all these clone me’s and the rapidly approaching dragonfly air-cars would have to go. But out of respect for past precommitments, I’d try to keep it nonlethal for now- just in case.

Unfortunately for me, simulacra weren’t _pushovers_. They had half my stats and skills. Most of them weren’t wearing magic items or under the effects of any buffs, so I had the advantage there as well, until the last round that the Efreet had cast on me began to wear off. For the time being they literally could not put out the numbers needed to penetrate my armor class but still- I needed to level the playing field and I couldn’t spend time clobbering them one on one.

I folded my wings and dropped. As I fell I cast one of the few spells in my _actual_ repertoire, as opposed to a wand or a _Page of Spell Knowledge. Sacred Geometry_ gave me a free 9th-level _Heightened Communal Mount_ and suddenly beneath me there was a knot of terrified ponies, falling through the sky. The other Haleys knew what I was about to do- they had my memories, after all- and they dove after us, but I physically blocked their line of sight to the horses and they couldn’t eliminate them before I finished my work. _Alter Summoned Monster_ went off and the first of the very normal, very scared falling ponies became a beautiful flying armored woman with vaguely elven features- an _Azata_. She nodded at me and threw out her _Wall of Force_ behind us as we fell. The other Haleys piled into the barrier. None dispersed into smoke, but that began to change as the first of my summoned Angels, a very traditional looking _Astral Deva_ , joined the fray with a summoned _Blade Barrier_ directly on top of them. I grimaced at the bloody mess the wall of whirling steel made of what was basically a bunch of copies of myself.

The fight did not take long after that. At the cost of one second level spell slot and six of my first level spells, I had six top-end summons in less than a minute, each with their own tremendous roster of spells and abilities that none of my clone sisters could hope to match. The encroaching Dragonfly craft banked away from the whirling cloud of angels and demons, and I let them go. Given that they mostly ran around in robots these days, I didn’t feel _too_ bad about blowing up a whole bunch of them, but you never knew. Mortals were fragile things. And my summons were based on a Mount spell so they’d last for multiple hours so it wasn’t like I was on a ticking clock. _Who needs wishes, anyway?_ As a Deva _Healed_ the Strength damage, I refocused my attention on the Ring, which had found its way back to my hand.

Too soon. A line of fire streaked up from ground level and _obliterated_ the angel before it could complete its spell. _What on earth was-_ I peered down- Delmutt herself, if I understood the markings on the armored shells she was using, and another score of her kin all piloting robots. And she’d brought a self-assembling artillery piece of some sort out of Volo Ingenium with her. That was interesting- I knew they’d been assisting the Contact forces but I didn’t know they had any railguns on the siege-scale, not since the big war she’d described to me. Had they made it just for me? Questions and wounded trust for later- another shot ripped up and while _I_ managed to move out of the way, my _Nalfeshnee_ demon didn’t. Two down in under a minute- I needed to close and eliminate. Non-lethally. Probably. I gave my orders to the summons.

I didn’t bother to dive dramatically for the surface. I palmed a wand of _Dimension Door_ and simply _appeared_ there, back-handing a trio of soldier drones out of the way. I didn’t pull the punch- I winced a bit as l blasted them to pieces. “You guys are all backed up, right?” I asked with concern. It would be _really_ stupid to come down here, even in the armored drones, without some kind of backup. They didn’t answer- instead their forms _dissolved_ and I realized I’d been tricked.

Delmutt had been reading up, apparently. Most things in Pathfinder outside of magic weapons simply couldn’t touch a creature with high enough AC. _Most_ things. But swarms? Oh, those could do _plenty_. The soldiers around Delmutt disintegrated into clouds of _millions_ of insect-sized nanobots and rolled over me like a tide. I honestly wasn’t sure if they were entirely autonomous or still being piloted but as they started jabbing into me with monomolecular edges I _really_ didn’t care. My damage reduction was high enough to blunt some of the trauma they should have been inflicting, but for the first time in this fight I was actually taking damage. Delmutt herself vanished- _an illusion_ \- and I found myself facing another dozen Haleys and a railgun crew, slightly repositioned from where I thought they’d been. _Well, that’s just great. Got me with my own trick._

I had definitively lost the momentum with this engagement but I still had my summons- or did I? Three of them flew at the Haleys and winked out. _Oh, some of you still had wishes left before my summoning ban came down, didn’t you. Cheeky things._ They’d covered themselves in antimagic fields! The radius on those was only ten feet or so but they’d very effectively suppress most of my remaining buffs if the Haleys managed to close- and I’d lose a physical fight eventually, distracted and already weakened as I was. They knew it, too- they launched forward with another wave of weakening breath and I found myself dogpiled, too hampered by the nanomachines to even begin to turn away. Two of them made grabs for the ring, still in one claw- one I disemboweled so viciously she puffed into smoke right away, the other I blinded by clamping my jaws around her face. A couple of vicious shakes and she was gone too. But the damage was beginning to accumulate.

They pinned me to the ground like a rabid dog, snapping and snarling. They got my head turned such that I couldn’t breath _back_ at them, and continuously hit me with the strength-sapping breath attacks until I was as weak as a kitten but not quite unconscious. The nanobots covering me joined together and hardened into something that wasn’t _quite_ shackles, but was remarkably unbreakable, just the same. But they left my mouth uncovered- it looked like Delmutt wanted to come speak to me. Her mistake. “Delmutt, none of- oof- this was necessary. Just let me put on the _damn_ Ring and- argh, damn, loosen your grip, clone-me- I can fix everything!”

She walked forward, not _quite_ the conquering queen, but looking a damn sight closer than I did at the moment with her dark red leather duster and shiny black body barely even scuffed by our engagement. “You know I want to believe you Haley, but I don’t think that’s fully _you_ in there. Hand over the ring of your own free will and we can talk.”

I gripped it tighter. “You know it’s me! I’m so _me_ that all these clones had to put out their ears just so they couldn’t hear me tell them to _let me go_. This is stupid! Greg’s not even hurt. You caught him, right?” There was a _little_ anxiety in my voice.

“The Haley I know doesn’t smash men flat and then drop them from great heights before asking if they’re _okay_ ,” she replied. To be fair, it was a _little_ out of character, but there were extenuating circumstances. “Based on what the rest of the crowd overheard you saying, I suspect it’s done something to influence you.”

I pouted. “Well, tough. You have no way to verify and you can’t _kill_ me. I mean you could, I guess, but it would be extremely foolish to do so. You’re going to have to trust me that when I put this on, I’ll finally have the power to solve all our problems.”

She shook her head. “You’re not putting that on.”

Well, I’d tried to be civil. “I wish I already had.”

She looked at me with a puzzled expression. “But… you didn’t?” It _was_ kind of a non-sequitur, but it wasn’t aimed at _her_. High up in the sky, well out of range of the anti-magic fields, my backup angel was hovering invisibly. When she heard my request she lit the _Candle of Invocation_ I’d given her, and with a flare of light Jada was back- hovering in the air alongside her, clad in an aura of heat and power. “A most _interesting_ wish, Lady Haley. Such a simple thing to trade a whole _world_ for. It is done.” She vanished and Delmutt ran towards the cannon silently, no doubt transmitting orders. But the antimagic field around my hand disappeared, just long enough for the One Ring to hover into place. And then- well, it was all over.

 _Power_. I hadn’t really understood it before. Oh, I’d had _Charisma_. I’d had _Strength_. I’d had immortality, of a sort. But it wasn’t anything like _this_. Now an entirely new source ran through me- I simply _stood up_ and two dozen dragons couldn’t stop me. I didn’t go invisible- there was too _much_ of me for that. But some part of me shifted into that spirit realm, tapped the energies that were stored there, and channeled them. I opened my mouth and sang a song of glory, and the Haleys who clung to me simply _evaporated_. I gave the gravity cannon a stern glare, and it was _flattened_. This was not wishing- power at one remove. This was simply my _will_ , physically expressed. I stood to my full height and allowed the draconic _Fear Aura_ that I usually suppressed to radiate and mingle with the true dominance granted to me by the ring.

The crowd in the stadium fell to their knees. Some pissed themselves- understandable given the circumstances, I thought. Mercifully, I did not disembowel them for spoiling my second ascension. Instead I surveyed them. Every head, turned to the ground. Every body knelt in supplication to me. _Yes_. This was appropriate. _Sauron himself could not match me._ The Ring _purred,_ on my claw. I began to turn away, to head into the gate network and complete my conquest of every part of the globe we’d touched so far, when a single upturned face caught my eye. So small I hadn’t noticed it before- in the back of the crowd. _Skylar_.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked, shocked. “You should be out with Christopher and the others.”

She walked forward, completely unphased by my aura. “I got tired of seeing all the fake-You’s and wanted to come talk to _real_ you. And now I find you… _fighting_ everyone! _Are_ you even real?”

I frowned in displeasure. “Watch your tone, child. I’ll not be-”

She stamped a foot petulantly. “I’m not going to watch my tone with you or _anyone_ else! You’re not Haley! You’re like… Aslan. You think just because you’re _strong_ you can go around… just hurting people and pushing them around. Like it doesn’t _matter_ as long as you can make them _say_ it doesn’t matter. But it does. It always matters. I won’t let you hurt anyone.”

Her words were like daggers to my heart. The aura of dominance slipped and I saw Delmutt recovering. “Skylar- you can’t- I _have_ to, to save-” why _was_ I doing this? It escaped me.

She wasn’t listening. “All _He_ wanted to do was take and take. Haley is all about _helping_ and _giving,_ that’s why I love her. She’d give every last piece of herself away if she could. _You_ just want to feel important. Well you are! A big important stupid _mess!_ Let everyone go!”

Delmutt took her opportunity, paced in front of me. “Do you remember our talk about the 4 horsemen? Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death?”

I nodded weakly. “I was willing to compromise with Aslan if it meant defeating them. How is this any different?”

She turned and leveled a finger at me, accusingly. “Because you _failed_. You led your husband to him like a _vessel_ to the _culling_. You couldn’t bring back a single person he had killed. You gave him what he wanted, brought _more_ war and killed dozens yourself! You could have _avoided_ that confrontation and a thousand or more people, _including Sean,_ might be alive a month later. If you had only been _patient._ Refused to make compromises for the sake of expediency. Understood the difference between the powers you wield and the power that runs this world.” She softened a bit, seeing how she was hurting me, and lowered her tone. “Now you’re doing it again. The Haley I know is too smart to make the same mistake twice.”

Her words were like a whip of white-hot fire across my soul. It broke a dam in me, anger I’d been feeling at myself for weeks but not let out. I bit back at her. “And what did you do? Run away to the world I’d built? Where was _anybody else_? I _need_ this Ring! The whole fucking _world_ has super powers and I’m _always_ the one who has to step in front of the fucking freight trains! Everyone else just waits for big hero _Haley_ to save the day! Just like he always did. Just like S-. Like-” I couldn’t say his name. The ring on my hand felt like liquid fire, and I wasn’t even vulnerable to that anymore. I fell to the ground and I wept, not even ashamed of the weakness on display.

Skylar came up and put a hand on my nose. She barely even stood up to eye level with me flat on the ground like this, but there was no fear in her. “Miss D took care of her people and taught them how to take care of us, and now here they are, ready to help. That was the lesson you taught us at the bunker.”

Delmutt came up beside her. “Nobody can stand with you because it’s _your story_ , Haley. No matter what part of you ends up telling it, I don’t think you’d ever let us get in harm’s way while you could avoid it. Recognize that for the choice it is and be proud of it.”

I didn’t have to listen to them. With the Ring and _Wish_ support I could still win this, conquer the world in a day. Did I _want_ to win this? Skylar was right- I _knew_ she was right. That was how I’d thought, was how I’d _operated_. Why was I throwing it all away for this- macguffin? What had Sauron ever even _done_ with this thing? Lost at least 3 wars that I knew of, that’s what. What exactly was it that made the damn thing so _desirable_? This seemed like the kind of situation where precommitment and an iron will would come in handy. But I was all out of will, and I had made no precommitments about _this_.

I opened my mouth and breathed, “I wish…” but they were both staring me in the eyes. One of them I could have dealt with. But both? I _couldn’t_ disappoint them both. The power faded. The ring fell from my numb claw like an anvil, _clanging_ to the ground. I rolled over on my side, and heard the collective intake of breath as the grip I’d had on the stadium relaxed. I’d _never_ wanted the Ring. Why had I thought even for a second that was a good idea? I couldn’t use any more wishes, couldn’t compound what was surely my biggest mistake to date, or I’d have teleported it into the sun. “I just wish _he_ was proud of the path that I did choose. The one where I don’t rule it all.”

And in that most appropriate and desolate moment in the depths of my despair, I had my first vision.


	33. Chapter 33

\-----

Sean, at Hogwarts

Date not measurable in relative time

\-----

The trees of the Forbidden Forest were an infinitely receding corridor of pillars, arching up and into each other as their branches intertwined, and everywhere I shifted my gaze another corridor raced off. It was as if I was standing in the center of a million paths through the underbrush, all coincidentally leading to this one place. Beneath me the grass swayed in time to a universal pulse that I could now feel- something from this world, or beyond? Impossible to say. Above me the skull of the Wiltshire Dog was hovering, joined shortly by the eyes, musculature, skin, and _fur_ of the Wiltshire Dog, in that order. This was less unsettling than I’d found it in the past. “Dog!” I said, grinning merrily. “Are you actually here or am I just high as fuck?” My magic reached out and sniffed the thing, confirming that it was at least as real as _I_ was. Which was a matter of some debate, to be honest.

“Both,” said the Dog, pithy as always. “Far be it from _me_ to suggest that you have better things to do than hallucinate in the woods, human. Such activity is more-or-less the foundation of my entire _reality_ , after all _._ But weren’t you here to learn magic?” He didn’t seem fully corporeal in this world- surprising, I thought, given how much influence Carroll had over British literature in general. If there was _anywhere_ he could manifest outside his own world, I figured it would be here.

“I was! Am. Sorry, concept of time’s sort of…” I waved my hands, trying to describe with body language how difficult it was to form coherent thoughts at the moment. My brain was basically _out to lunch_ and I was operating on pure consciousness- great for journeys inward, not so great for talking to a very real magic dog in the very real haunted woods. I tried to keep my cool- social anxiety could send me down a path that would ruin the entire trip. “Magic turned out to be much more, and _less_ , complicated than I thought. Mostly it was just lonely. Say hello, magic!” I giggled as the detached and magical part of my soul grabbed the Dog and spun him about harmlessly. He looked positively alarmed, which was a first for me. “Oh good it actually works on you too, I wasn’t really sure how it would interact until now.” He felt… _less_ tractable than the solid objects I’d handled, but not impossible to get a grip on.

After he recovered himself, he pulled his pace-behind-a-tree-in-midair vanishing act and appeared seated at my side. It was a little less fun, I thought, when you could actually trace every step of the way with your own expanded consciousness. I idly scritched his ears until he spoke again. “Well I won’t interrupt further. If anything, this is _fascinating_. Rather more Luke on Dagobah than something out of Hogwarts. Perhaps I’ll be your Yoda, for the next session.” _There he goes with the Star Wars references again. Cecilia must have been a big fan._ In any case he stopped speaking, and after a moment or two I closed my eyes. Ignoring the splash of color and light as the spheres of the multiverse leap into being before me, I continued my inward journey.

\---

A month ago

\---

“Psilocybin,” I said, standing in the office of the Potions Master. “Is broken down by the body into Psilocin, a Serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It also binds to the same receptors, which can cause hallucination and visual perception, though that isn’t what I want it for. There’s a _suggestion,_ though I can’t remember if it has been confirmed, that the chemical may also force the brain to form new biologically stable pathways that make self-conscious thinking almost impossible. It’s supposed to be tremendously effective as a meditation tool.” 

Snape’s office was surprisingly nice- more of Harriet’s work, I assumed, because the one in the books and movies had been described as a dimly lit dungeon. _This_ office was the workshop of a master craftsman- cluttered, but well organized, with a place for everything and everything in its place. The particularly dangerous chemicals and concoctions he actually had locked away beneath a fume hood- probably enchanted, but still! That was the most safety equipment I’d seen in a full week of auditing the weird and terrible classes at Hogwarts.

The man himself was largely unchanged- at least, toward _most_ students. I still shuddered to remember sitting in the back of the room during that first Potions lesson between Snape and Harry. I’d had to slip in last-minute to avoid Draco finding a seat anywhere near me, but that was _one_ class I wouldn’t skip for all the world. “I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses,” he’d said, with a lingering doe-eyed glance at the young man in the back row. “ _Mr. Potter_ , our… new celebrity. Tell me, what would I get if I added powdered asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” Harry had started from his reverie, glancing around at his compatriots. “Me, sir?” he asked, indicating himself. “Oh no, Mr. Potter,” said Snape, almost absentmindedly as if lost in a daydream- “It’d take an _entirely different_ sort of concoction to get you.” I’d nearly died of a coughing fit and excused myself.

But it had cemented my plan of action in my mind. Now, in front of the man himself, I was having second thoughts. “Tell me, _Mr._ Peakes, if that is your real name-” he purred, full of dark intensity and mysterious purpose. It worked a lot better on actual 11 year olds, I assumed. “Oh yes, Dumbledore told me all _about_ you, not that I believe everything I hear. Why would I provide _illicit_ substances to you under _any_ circumstances? Why do I not simply throw you in detention for the next month just for asking? Yes, unlike many of my… _colleagues,_ ” I had to hand it to him, he had an _impressive_ sneer- “I am aware of Muggle chemistry and even, to some degree, their recreational use of drugs. I am _not_ in the habit of dealing to my students. Especially ones who, to hear the _others_ tell it… can’t even _cast_ a spell?”

I really didn’t have time to mince words with a catty bitch. I cut to the chase. “I look eleven but I’m more-or-less the same age as _you_ so cut the shit, Severus. I’m _also_ far more intimately familiar with _your_ story than you are with _mine_. I’ll demonstrate but first I want a guarantee that you aren’t going to throw me out of this room when I hurt your feelings.”

Snape rolled his eyes but with my _other_ senses, still in their infancy, I perceived him casting something that I surmised was a privacy spell on the room. “I do not tremble before the barbs of precocious children, _Sean_. Carry on.”

I sighed. “You felt responsible for the death of Lily and James Potter because you reported the prophecy to Voldemort that got her killed. You remain in his good graces but secretly work for the Order of the Phoenix out of a need to redeem yourself. You know that you must publicly shun Harry Potter but you are secretly falling madly in love with him…because of _Lapsus Libidine,_ or whatever.” Okay that last was a guess but _come on_ , I wasn’t an idiot.

He leapt out of his chair halfway through my spiel and levelled his wand at my chest. A frightening situation, but honestly I’d been in worse and I trusted in the narrative- nothing would be served if he killed me here. “A _legilimens_ ,” he hissed, referring to HP’s version of mind-reading. “I don’t know how you got past my defenses but-”

I cut him off. “Your defenses have nothing to do with it. I read the _books_. I’m under orders not to influence future events so I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But you’re well aware that I’ve never cast a spell, so I can’t possibly have read your mind. You can check it yourself.” He did so, and eventually satisfied his paranoia that I did not have any _backup_ wands either. He remained wary, but climbed down off the metaphorical ceiling eventually.

He sat behind his desk, hands folded. “Let us say, hypothetically, that I believe you. _Unsettling_ as it is to have your knowledge about me floating free, I will not be blackmailed. If that is all you’ve come to do I will bid you goodnight and warn you that any attempt to-”

He was just as paranoid even _without_ the sneering veneer of a fantasy villain. I cut him off again. “Damn it Severus I’m not here to threaten you, I’m here to _help_ you. I need to reach a deep meditative state to test a theory about a different form of magic. I don’t care if it’s Psilocybin or not. What I can offer in return is my _help_. I can give you dates, times, locations. Places nobody will notice if you and Harry run into one another. I’m _not_ going to help you… _romance_ him.” He grimaced, and I sighed with a little bit of relief that that was apparently not his intent, _not yet anyway_. “But I can make it substantially easier for you to find time to speak with him, unnoticed. You _need_ an ally in this. Circumstance has offered me up to you.” _Circumstance, and a certain teenage girl who is going to get SUCH a lecture if I ever see her again. I feel like even this is farther than Sean-in-his-right-mind would ever go._

He considered and I waited with baited breath. Eventually the pull of the narrative won out, and he nodded. “I cannot get you psilocybin on such short notice. But there are several other… substances, which may help you achieve the same effects. You will tell _no one_ , and you will provide me with a list of times and places no later than one week from now.” We shook on it and I made myself scarce. I didn’t like that I was feeding into a romance plot that, while amusing from the outside, was _highly_ questionable when you started looking at power differentials and issues of informed consent. But the story was going there _anyway_ and I rationalized that that made it less… _un_ ethical to help, if it got me out of here. Didn’t it? 

\---

Present

\---

I fell inwards and down. It felt rather like the surface of my mind was a sea shore, and I was setting sail in some kind of boat into waters unknown. But, _beneath_ the ocean as well, somehow. This was the third of Snape’s party favors I had tried and the first to prove _really_ successful- the first, Wanderwort, had knocked me right out, while the second, a blue powder called Fool’s Snuff, had made me hallucinate _demons_ for two hours- some of the little bastards were _still_ following me weeks later, and Madame Pomfrey gave me some very suspicious looks when she saw the hem of my robes randomly catch light while faint cackling carried through the air. I was beginning to despair of the project when he gave me this final prospect- a magical strain of Azurescens that _danced_ , swaying its little cap seductively in the strangest motion I’d ever seen produced by the fruiting body of a fungus. And boy had it done the trick.

I disconnected from the conscious portion of my mind, and spread outward. My mission today was to identify the path to this magical portion of myself, and communicate with it. I knew that on some level it _was_ me, but it seemed disjoint enough in daily life that it was more like a friendly dog or attentive butler- willing to work with me, but not particularly well trained or interested in following commands. It wasn’t _instinctual_ yet. I had managed to educate it on a dozen or so spells through wand motion, spells it would repeat on command and _generally_ get more-or-less the effect that I wanted, but it was quite frustrating to try the Colour Changing Charm and have an object become so refulgently _red_ that the kids in the castle thought someone was shooting off fireworks. And _nothing_ I did worked in there- the second I passed through the doors, my magic became like a phantom limb to me. And I to it, I’d learned- it couldn’t sense my directions _nearly_  as well. After a single disastrous lesson in charms class where I’d nearly put Professor Flitwick through the stone ceiling, I had not attempted to do any more casting in the school. Having never even seen me _lift_ my wand, most of the children had begun to assume that I was some kind of squib- reactions had varied from pity to outright bullying, which I largely ignored. The opinions of children mattered a lot _less_ to me, these days, which was a nice change from my _actual_ elementary and high school experience.

But not Draco, of course. Oh no. He was _convinced_ that I was hiding something, and took every opportunity to snoop and lurk about. It was harder and harder to get out of the castle without him, and rumors were already flying about our illicit rendezvous in the woods. _That_ was harder to ignore. Not because I wanted there to be a rendezvous, mind you- but there was an intense tug in the back of my mind that kept saying _if something WERE to happen_ … I viciously suppressed such thoughts. _That isn’t me_. _Get out of my head, Harriet._

I stood on the boat of myself as it dove into deep waters- flashes of anger and joy and humiliation and triumph and a hundred other emotions crept over me as the waves broke and the light from above the waterline began to dim, simultaneously. I realized that I was traveling through some kind of… emotional _core_. Of course, it made sense that the secret to the Potterverse’s magic would live in such a place. The core conceit of half the narrative was the power of emotion on magic, wasn’t it? I didn’t try to shunt the emotions away- I _was_ the emotions, and experiencing them was the point of the journey. Instead I traveled _through_ them, as the sea foam blasted me in the face with flecks of lust, and the bubbles of my greatest despair traveled upwards to burst on the surface, far above. This metaphor was getting unwieldy, I thought.

Before I could consider altering it, a flicker of something caught my eye. A vast _shape_ , in the infinite black water, moving fast, staying outside the dim light I could see by. I was drawing closer then. I _hoped_ I was drawing closer. _I didn’t really consider what else could be lurking, this deep_.

Harry and Snape had been getting on like a house on fire. Harry was a sweet kid, for an eleven year old who’d been trapped in a broom closet most of his life- a bit dim, but his heart was in the right place. He hadn’t seen past Severus’s veneer of sneering cruelty yet, and he _hated_ him with a fiery passion that was actually pretty common among the Gryfindors I’d met. Yet at the same time something about the dark flouncing of his mother’s former BFF fascinated him, and already they’d been trapped in at least two scenarios that I knew of. Draco and Harry had also kicked off their rivalry, albeit less heatedly, and I had parleyed the fake duel in the Trophy Room into a chance encounter with Snape rather than Filch. Harry’s pals ran off when he appeared, but Harry returned to the common room alive and well some time later, albeit… a bit bemused. _That_ , and his firm silence on the matter, kicked the rumor mill into high gear. When the Nimbus 2000 arrived for him this morning it had a single raven’s feather tied to the grip, and half the girls in Hufflepuff had some kind of stroke at the sight. It was mucking up the timeline somewhat but I hadn’t seen any real damage come of it, so far.

My boat settled on a vast shoal at the bottom of the ocean. _The very roots. The foundation of my emotional understanding of the world?_ It was hard to even _conceive_ of the concept of “I” down here- I was simply a viewpoint, in the moment, an eternal camera capturing whatever caught my interest. Nevertheless I wondered what my core would be. Jumping from the deck, I made contact with it. _Curiosity_. A desire to know, to _be_ , more than I was. A growth mindset. _Of course. Of course._ Some great sense of… _relief_ washed over me. I hadn’t realized I had even been nervous about understanding this part of myself. But confirming that such a thing lay at the center of the construct I called _self_ … it firmed me up, in some way. Let me feel more real. I turned to meet the leviathan swimming silently up behind me.

She was vast. Bigger than the ocean, bigger than the _world_. In some sense she was _both_ , and I had been swimming through _her_ as well as myself all this time. Distinctly female, distinctly _me_ yet not me _._ She had purpose and power but no form, as such, until I looked at her. When I observed her in her totality she settled, and I felt relief again. _Another of course for the pile. So many revelations, and not a one of them surprising._ I stood on the heart of me and stared at its occupant- the vast golden dragon. _Mysterious and powerful. Alien but intimate. Lawful yet wild, untamed. Magical, beyond space and time, beyond all comprehension. Love_.

It made perfect sense that she would look like my wife- after all, those were the thoughts that dominated the emotion, for me. I realized she was waiting for me to speak. I cleared my throat and ignored the bubbles spinning away underwater. “Sean,” I said, extending my hand. “Pleased to finally meet you.”

She did not reach out to shake back. She seemed wary, if anything. “What are you?”

I blinked. How to explain oneself to one’s own conception of an emotion? “Don’t you know? I’m _you_. I’m the… the thing that _feels_ the feeling that you _are_. We’ve met before- I’ve been trying to do magic with you. I wanted to come here and… and meet you on your terms.”

She brightened at that. “Oh! I recognize that shape now. So interesting, I usually only see your shell dimly through the riot of colors and synaesthesia that comes when I’m outside. It’s quite overwhelming at times. I’m glad you came down here! You’re not going to hurt me, are you?” She even _sounded_ like Haley, and I was momentarily overtaken with longing for the woman I could not currently reach. As my emotions surged the ocean _pulsed_ and she grew, visibly. _I guess absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all_. She looked puzzled. “What was _that?_ It felt… good.”

I smiled wistfully. “Just thinking about the person you represent. Also, what do you mean about hurting you?”

She swam around me, so huge that she _should_ have formed an enormous whirlpool just by her movement. It didn’t move me in the slightest. I felt _absolutely safe_ in her presence. “There’s something _else_ in the depths with me. Look!” She rolled and exposed her belly- great sucker-marks marred the scales there, as if she were a whale who’d one battle with a giant squid. “I don’t like it. It _attacks_ me and I feel lesser. Make it stop?”

I didn’t have the faintest clue what she meant by it. I certainly hadn’t changed my opinion on my wife, and I wasn’t about to! _An external force?_ “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you,” I said, and I _meant_ it. “I’ve promised that before. Til death do us part, and maybe more than one death, at that.” She smiled and it was radiant. “When was the last time it happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean by time.”

I grimaced. _Of course she doesn’t have a concept of sequence- she’s timeless, after all._ “Uh. Us talking now, that’s one event. And the thing attacking you, that’s… _another_ event. Since you _remember_ that happening, it must have happened _before_ this one. That’s time- the dimension in which events can be compared.”

She just looked confused. “But it’s _always_ attacking me. And we’ve always been talking. Haven’t we?”

That sounded less rhetorical and more… metaphysical. I grew alarmed. “Is it attacking you right now? Can you _show_ me?”

She whirled and some other portion of her vast bulk came into view. Sure enough, it was being… _torn_ at, latched onto and leeched away by many tendrils of every size and shape, spinning away to some dark depth that I couldn’t perceive. As I watched she snapped and snarled at them, ripping some away, but they were always replaced. Scales came away, and blood tainted the water. Horror filled me- _my love for my wife is under attack._ Was this the work of the narrator? How could I not have noticed something shifting my values like this? I leapt at it, and a blade of rejection sprang to my hand. When _I_ made a cut, the tendril _stayed_ cut. The thing fought back- whipping and lashing in a frenzy. But my will overrode it, and it landed no blows on me. My magic swam at my side, fighting as well, and between us we dismantled the thing and sent it fleeing into the depths. Magic sighed. “Oh, that’s so much better. What _is_ that?” I didn’t know and I wasn’t ready to guess. We stayed together for a time, silently.

Eventually I held out my hand again. “Can we work together, from now on? Now that I know what you are, how to listen for you- it should be much easier for me to protect you, and you to work with me.” This time she shook, and as our hands touched the bubbles surged around me and the dream dissolved.

I was back in the forest, sitting up against a tree, and the Wiltshire Dog was nowhere to be seen. Twilight was beginning to fall- it would be dinnertime soon and if I didn’t get back Hagrid was going to come out after me again. But I could feel the magic now, in a way I hadn’t been able to before. It wasn’t a dog or a detached limb- it was my love, all of it, surging outwards and around me in a great radiant aura. A spell came to me unbidden and I _had_ to cast it, I knew the magic was requesting it of me. _The true form of the Patronus charm- it isn’t a ward at all. It’s a physical manifestation of my magic._ I didn’t lift my wand. I already knew the form this was going to take. I barely had to mouth the words. “ _Expecto Patronum-”_ and my magic _surged_ and burst forth in a bloom of light. A perfect picture of my Haley stood in front of me, big as real life, luminous and white but _real_ for all that. I rushed for her and fell to my knees as I passed straight through. I bit back the surge of despair as the form dimmed slightly, and she knelt down to nuzzle me- I accepted the comfort even if I couldn’t feel it.

Our private moment was interrupted- a crash in the forest underbrush and a triumphant shout sent me whirling. Draco was standing there, robes disheveled and eyes wild, pointing at the dragon over my shoulder. “I _KNEW IT_ ” he whispered angrily, gesturing at her. “You CAN cast spells, and your patronus! It’s a dragon! You DO care about me!” _Oh goddamit._ I hadn’t even made the connection between his name and the creature before now. _Is that some kind of cosmic irony?_

My Patronus shuffled uncomfortably. Then it opened its mouth and spoke. “Sean, what _is_ this? Is that… _Draco Malfoy?_ ” It sounded _just_ like her. Wait, Patronuses couldn’t speak for themselves _._ Dimly it registered with me- this wasn’t _just_ my magic, just an illusion. A connection had been formed, a slim tether that I could barely even perceive, extending _out_ of the world.

I turned toward her, shuffling around on my knees in the dirt once again, mouth hanging open. “H-Haley?” It occurred to me in that moment, we hadn’t spoken since the afternoon on the hill. I’d been _assuming_ that she was alive, that things would work out with Aslan after she gained full control, but I’d had no way to confirm. “Are you really… here? I’ve missed you so much. Oh honey.” I reached out and my hand rippled through her like smoke.

Draco stalked up behind me, hissing. “ _Don’t_ try to bluff your way out of this one, _Peakes_. You aren’t going to play that dragon off- _all month_ I’ve been trying to understand why you won’t talk to me, won’t look me in the eye. I’ve been tearing my _hair_ out over you, and here you are, summoning my namesake in the woods! _Enough_ of your games.” The last thing on earth that I wanted to deal with right now was a boy child with a _crush_ and an entitlement complex the size of the _planet_ , but all my magic was tied up and I couldn’t risk losing her. I ignored him.

She looked at me, still confused but understanding our time might be limited. “Sean- I, there’s too much I need to say. So much has happened and I don’t know if I can _do_ this, I-”

I tried to soothe her. “You can, you’re stronger than you know, than anyone knows. I love you so much. I’ll write to you. We’ll see each other again, soon, just as soon as I can stand by your side.”

She choked back a sob, “You can do that _right now_ , please come home. I love you and I miss you and it’s _all falling apart._ ”

I stood up and held out my hands. “I _can’t_. I _died_ in that world, honey. I don’t exist there any more, narratively. I’ve got to find some other way back to you. But I _will_. Haley, there’s so much more to all this than you know- ask the Dog where we really came from-” and then our time was up- Haley shouted a warning and I had barely begun to turn as that bleach-blonde idiot shouted _EXPELLIARMUS_ and miscast the spell so hard it threw me to the ground, cutting my Patronus spell off entirely.

As Haley’s image evaporated he looked alarmed. “You- what _are_ you, Peakes? What _was_ that… thing?” Then his natural arrogance reasserted itself. “No- you’ve gone _mad_ with longing. That’s what it is-” he turned, muttered something that I only half heard, “-must have made the _dosage_ too high-” and then turned back, leveling his wand at me. “Back to the castle, _you_. Everyone’s going to hear about this. Bad enough you snub _me_ , but you’ve been keeping your spells from everyone? Skiving off your classes? You think the rest of the house is going to take kindly when they hear how many points you cost them?”

A hundred years as Sheriff taking lives like a farmer reaps his crop welled up inside me. My magic surged at my back, love curdling into something like a _killing rage_ barely restrained and some of it began to leak out into the surroundings. The forest turned dark and the grass began to clutch at his feet. I don’t think he liked the look in my eyes when I stood up. “You.” I said. “ _You_.” I couldn’t get more out than that. _You just ended the first conversation with my wife in three months. Maybe the only one I’ll get._ “Little boy, you need to _run away._ If you stay here they will _never find your body._ ” My voice didn’t sound anything like an eleven year old’s, now. He cowered and turned to flee, not one speck of triumph left in his eyes. I let him. 

Consequences be damned, it was well past time for a reckoning with the author of this farce.


	34. Chapter 34

\----

Haley, At The Stadium

Present Day

\----

When the vision of Sean cleared, I was still on the ground of the stadium. For a moment, I was stunned into silence. I’d known that he was alive of course, after I got the letter from him- but to _see_ him, even if he was in a child’s body, and to know he missed me as much as I missed him- it helped, somehow. Healed something in me that had started to break. Skylar and Delmutt were still looking at me with concern. Nobody had moved from their positions- I’d been out of it for a few seconds at most. I _knew_ what I’d seen was real. He was alive, he’d made it to Hogwarts, we’d see each other again. I had work to do here in the meantime. If I hadn’t fucked everything up.

I stood up and the others backed away warily. “It’s fine. I’m not… crazy, anymore. Can you have a completely autonomous drone handle that ring until Greg wakes up? We need to decide what to do until then.” Delmutt nodded and Skylar came over to hug me. I shifted down to human size and hugged her back, careful not to squeeze too hard. A full month of being a dragon was enough for a little while. The human contact felt good.

The rest of the stadium had risen from their kneeling positions but most looked like they didn’t want anything to do with me, in the moment. I felt the same awkwardness but there was no time for polite distance. I used a wand of _Major Illusion_ to project my voice across the stadium. “Everyone- I’m sorry. What just happened- this is why I insist that we don’t have a strict hierarchy in Contact. Memetic hazards are very real and I’m just as vulnerable as anyone. If you got hurt in all that, please talk to a clone me, they’ll fix you right up.” It occurred to me that wands were going to be in short supply in the very near future, without _Wish_ replenishment. _We stocked up but… only enough for weeks, not years. And not enough for the whole human race. Damn the Efreet for putting me in this position!_ But it hadn’t been the Efreet, in the end. It was my own inability. _Why didn’t I come up with some kind of backup- it seems so obvious in hindsight!_ Had it been my desire for the easy path, the quick victory? My eye twitched- I wrote it off as agitation and focused elsewhere. “I’m going… to be stepping back, for a while,” I continued through my megaphone. “My trip to Washington will be my last operation with you all for the time being.”

Delmutt nodded and walked forward. I could see Roy approaching from the crowd, as well. He had grass stains on the knees of his camo from kneeling, and I felt a fresh wave of shame. _I’m sorry_. Delmutt looked me in the eyes for a moment, making sure I was okay. “I’m going to be leaving too, for a while.”

I blinked in surprise. “What? Where will you go?”

She turned and looked out past the ruins of the tower, toward the horizon. “You remember our conversation of a few weeks ago?” I did- I’d brought her some promising leads. “Out, into this world. We need other options, if we’re going to save as many of my people as we can. More technologies. _Your_ world isn’t the only set of rules we can play by. There will be other narrators here, with settings that may work to our advantage. I’ll go and find them.”

It made sense. I wanted to help, but it seemed like I was always out of step with her rescue operations. “Look for the science fiction stories. Near earth orbit, maybe. If you got ahold of Star Trek replicators… it would solve a lot of problems for _all_ of us.” She nodded, and moved to hug me as Skylar had. The infomorphs weren’t a physical race, for the most part, but she’d been more adaptable than most. “Keep an eye out for Zeno,” I said, referring to her partner, whom she still hadn’t found. So many dead, out there- she might never. “I’ll be in touch if I see him.” She nodded and turned to leave as Roy arrived.

“So,” he said. “That happened.” He’d been present or at least on the line for most of the adventures of the last month. He _knew_ that stuff like this was happening all over. But it was different, when it happened to you. “You had quite a power boost there, discounting side effects. Felt like looking at Aslan all over again. But you let it go. What changed?” A valid question. He had a right to answers from me.

“Nothing changed,” I said, gesturing at the Ring now being scooped up by an autonomous drone. “I never wanted that kind of power. You’re familiar with Lord of the Rings, Captain?” He nodded. “Then you know what that thing can do. It got to me, briefly. But it was… _is_ … an artificial desire. I found something I wanted more.”

He considered the boxy little drone flying off with what was easily the most dangerous artifact we’d encountered, to date. “Do you _really_ not desire that?” He turned back to me. “I look at everything you’ve done, and I wonder. After the last month, after all you’ve done- there would be plenty of people who would back you, if you decided it was time that you ran everything.”

_Would you, Captain? After the Colonel and his massacres, somehow I don’t think you’ll ever back a tyrant again._ I crossed my arms. “If I did, I just had my opportunity and I let it fly away. Take that as a demonstration of my _sincerity_ , Captain. I’m here to help the rest of the world become what it needs to be, in the face of this new reality. Not to rule it. All I want…” _is to go home_. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I asked a question that had been bothering me for a while. “Do you have a family, Roy? You never mention them.”

He shook his head in the negative. “Used to. Wife and a little girl. Couple years ago I shipped to Afghanistan. We called every week while I was on deployment. I always thought _I_ was the one in danger. One week, they didn’t pick up. Then the next. It took three fucking weeks for the Army to get word to me- there’d been a car crash. Lost my wife instantly… my daughter, we turned off her ventilator a year later. Nobody left, now.” His voice was detached, raw. “When all this started, I thought- for a minute, I thought- maybe I’d see them again, with the rules changed. But not _that_ rule.” He looked at me with eyes full of pain that, by all rights, shouldn’t have moved me. _Half the world disappeared, Haley._ Everyone had the kind of loss he carried, these days. But I felt it more keenly when I looked at him. “I guess that’s why I can’t fully trust you. Knowing your family might still be out there, you’re still here. How can you stay? What kind of person could?”

_My god._ I didn’t know whether to step towards him or stay perfectly still. The question _burned_ , and it was one part anger and one part fear that he was right. That I was some kind of monster, for staying instead of running to Sean. _Save yourself, save the ones you love, save the world. In that order. Did you forget? Is that the piece of you that you feel deep inside is still missing? You know there’s something wrong._ My eye twitched again. “No.” I denied my own internal monologue, and him, in the same breath. “I’m _not_ still here. Every moment of every day I’m out there with him, in my head, worrying and waiting and hoping for word. But I wouldn’t leave this world to die any more than you would have left men on the battlefield, Captain. I’m _bound_ here, so long as I have the power to save one more life. If we went to our loved ones, having left others to die for us- could we look them in the eyes?” I looked into his, and he met my gaze for a second before looking down. I couldn’t tell what he thought of it.

“She’s a hero,” piped up Skylar, and I jumped. I honestly had forgotten she was standing right there. “She’ll never stop until we’re all safe. That’s what it means.” She hugged me again and I was glad for her presence, even if I disagreed with her assessment. _A hero would want this_.

He considered us both for a long moment, but I noticed that he couldn’t look long at Skylar. Now I had a good idea why. “A hero, huh. I heard a quote, once. ‘True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.’” He considered me, for another long moment. For some reason I felt like worlds hung in the balance of his judgement. Eventually he nodded. “Slip-ups aside, it fits. You want me on your side, I want you to do something for the world. Find a way to _stop_ you, if something like this happens again. Hand it off. Can you do that?” I nodded. That gap in my soul twinged again. _I wonder if I already have._ He took my reassurance and moved on. “Listen, there’s another contingent coming in from France, they apparently made contact with the English last night and they’ve got something they want you to see, they say it’s urgent-”

I sighed. “Surely it can wait, Roy. I need more than a few hours away from here, I’m going to get this Washington job out of the way.”

He nodded in understanding. “I’m sure it’ll keep or someone else can handle it. I’ll pass word, and round up a cell to meet you at the Baltimore gate.” He turned to leave but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Roy.” He didn’t turn to look at me. “Don’t give up on hope. These are strange times, and… once we know _why_ my resurrection spells won’t work, we might-”

He cut me off. “Don’t.” It sounded like he was holding back a deep well of emotion. “Don’t offer me that. I can’t go through it again.” He looked like he was going to walk away, but then he added. “Just… don’t wait too long. You have a second chance to see the people you love. Don’t leave it to the last minute.” I let my hand drop.

Skylar was still at my side. “Do you really mean it, about bringing everyone back?” She still missed her brother, I knew. How could she not? It had only been a month. I squeezed her shoulders.

“I do. Sean knows more about what’s really going on with the stories than I do, I think. I’ve been too focused on… fire-fighting. I think I need to start paying attention to what it is that caught fire in the first place.” _After_ I got to Washington. “Are you going to be okay? Do you have a way to get home?”

She smiled. “It’s fine! The gates let me get anywhere, and the ‘morphs always keep an eye out for me. They don’t follow me like the others but all I have to do is wave and they’ll help me. She demonstrated, and indeed, a flyer landed shortly after. It looked like they were the ones tasked with attending to Greg- I saw that the ring-bearer drone had made its way back to him, though he was still unconscious. More shame welled up, and I suppressed it ruthlessly. _Focus, do the right thing now_.

“Skylar, can you talk to Greg, and get word to the Dog? I need that Ring off of our planet as fast as possible. Tell them to get it back to his world. If we can help him avoid consequences that’s okay. But… he can’t bring that war here. He _can’t_.” She nodded solemnly. For all that she was barely eleven, I trusted her more than most of the adults around here to actually execute on those instructions. “You’re a good kid, Skylar. I may be gone for a while. ...Take care of your brother and sisters, okay?” She nodded again and tears welled up. We hugged a while longer, and then I left her there, heading into the gates and whatever strange fate had befallen our former capital.

\----

It was a perspective shift to walk the branching paths of the gate network while knowing there wouldn’t be any further expansion for a while, without wishes to draw on. A month was a short time, but this had _become_ my world, however briefly. The biggest portals were all lined with empty drone bodies, ready for infomorph consciousnesses to hot-drop in the moment there was a sign of trouble. It had only been minutes since Jada disappeared, but so far there was no reported activity inside Volo Ingenium. They all knew it was coming. The infomorphs were digging in, the humans were mostly withdrawing their operations entirely. With luck they’d be done before it broke.

I wouldn’t give my dimension up. The Efreet deserved a place in it, if they could be peaceable- but I didn’t trust them. If they came in force, I’d respond- I regretted the deaths of Aslan’s men, but I didn’t feel that I would have many options besides lethal force, against something as threatening as a genie invasion. And what had Jada meant, about a force from the East? Was she referring to the Ring? It seemed a little too pat. Well, if I knew how these things went, she’d have phrased it in such a way that I wouldn’t know until the very last- no, that was defeatist. I paused in my walk and turned my whole attention towards her words. _Intelligence 33_ had not gifted me with eidetic memory, but it was a close thing. “Lest your best laid plans become a study in scarlet,” she’d said. I cross referenced in my head. A story title occurred. Arthur Conan Doyle? “Holmes,” I muttered. “She was referencing Sherlock Holmes.” It didn’t get me very far. I couldn’t understand how _he_ could be much of a threat- he had no powers beside his mind, though I wouldn’t discount _that_ \- but also wouldn’t he be on _my_ side? Still, one step closer. “You aren’t going to blindside me, you cherry-red bitch,” I muttered as I resumed walking. I’d keep thinking about it.

The Contact cell was waiting for me at the branch that lead to the eastern seaboard. They were good people- I’d resisted incorporating the more militant elements we’d encountered as much as possible. Half of this team had come from a division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that we’d picked up in the first week. The other half were veterans from one of Roy’s squads. They’d seen a couple of deployments when the food riots had begun to get bad, around week two. They’d calmed the situations with no casualties on any side, and I trusted they’d know what the appropriate level of force was here- I’d asked that we all go in armed with nonlethal weapons for the time being.

The Captain was here as well- he hadn’t actually said he _wouldn’t_ be attending, but it was surprising. He tossed me a salute for the sake of his underlings and I waved him aside. “I’m not in charge of this operation, Roy, you are. I’m here to provide muscle and help you with any narrative jams. You know the mission as well as I do, you make the tactical calls on the ground.” I was no soldier- I was more like the world’s most heavily armed civilian. I knew they’d listen but I didn’t want any life to hinge on my inability, down there. Not with my missing pieces hanging over my head.

He eyed me. “Did you have a chance to think about what I asked from you?”

I was about to deny him but something tickled my memory. “No, I- wait. I _did_.” That was weird. I didn’t remember doing this at all, but I remembered that I had the results. A single manila envelope marked “Emergencies Only.” I handed it off to him. He nodded, and handed it in turn to one of his soldiers. _Where the hell did I get that?_ That feeling of _absence_ intensified. All the more reason not to take charge here.

He turned to the rest of the group. Six men and three women looked back. They wore a variety of tactical gear- body armor, of course, but they also carried a high powered drone kit, night vision equipment, thermal imaging gear, and a variety of non-lethal weaponry like stun grenades and beanbag shotguns. Each carried a knife as a last line of self defense, but I had been fairly adamant about limiting the killing power of these teams. In almost no circumstance was it going to be enough to deal with narrative threats, and I did not want to meet _human_ issues with force as a first response. If it needed killed, I would be the one getting dirty.

The lieutenant briefed them. “Night of the Swap we lost contact with a lot of places. Most, we’ve been able to get back into just by walking up to them. Washington is an exception. There’s a band of hurricane-force winds around that place, fifty mile radius, and nobody we’ve sent into them has come back. Weird thing is they’re not centered on the _capital,_ exactly- center is closer to Rockville to the northwest. Our job is to find out what’s going on inside, establish contact with the locals, and extract. We’ll have one of the gates with us-” he gestured to an armored personnel carrier which was parked on the colossal branch behind us. It would be equipped to carry one of the smaller gate entrances, once we drove out of this dimension. “So getting _out_ won’t be much of a problem, unless we need to close it behind us. I hear the robot Extras are a bit busy right now, so we won’t be getting any high tech support, but we’ve got the grandmother of all Extras _herself_ right here for backup. Don’t you make this look like a two-bit _Dudley Dooright_ operation in front of the boss, Mounties.” There was some good natured chuckling and ribbing as they suited up. As I was still in human form, a couple of them shook my hand. “Thought you’d be a bit bigger, miss,” said one whose nametag read _Matt Cooper_ as I walked over to the APC.

“Only when I get excited, sergeant.” _That_ got a laugh, at least. _Bring them all home, Haley_. I swore then and there I’d do my best. We got in the APC and drove for the Baltimore gate.

\----

It wasn’t _wind_. It was… a _tornado_ , a wall of hurricane force that cut through the lower half of Baltimore like a scythe. The air before it was whipped and roaring, overwhelmed by the sound of it. It stretched from the earth into the sky and, I was reliably informed, right on up to the stratosphere. _Satellites_ couldn’t seem to get good intel on the inside of this thing. The wind moved parallel to the ground, from east to west, just a sheer and towering cliff of flying debris. _No wonder nobody’s come in or out_. What _was_ this thing and why did I have the strangest feeling that I was standing on some kind of precipice?  Baltimore had effectively been cut in half by it- the northern side, where we were at, had long since cleared out within several miles of the wind-wall, which at least hadn’t _expanded_ since it first appeared.

One of the soldiers from Roy’s unit waved to us in the back of the APC. “Geiger counter outside the vehicle’s spiking. I don’t know how to read this thing, someone tell me if shit’s fucked or not.” I walked back and looked at the counter. My heart skipped a beat. _This can’t be right_. The rest of the crew looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t going to lie to them- “It’s saying… ten thousand microseiverts per hour.”

The soldier who’d called me looked blank. “Is that… bad? I don’t have any context.”

I nodded. “That’s pretty bad, yeah. Fifty thousand is your maximum allowable annual dose by US rules. And we’re not even in the cloud, yet. You’d get lower background radiation if you measured outside _Chernobyl_ , right now. This tub is NBC rated, right?” The captain nodded and banged his fist on the padded interior. “So we should be safe if we don’t leave it. Still, it might be better if everyone who _can,_ waits on the other side of this gate. You can still look through, but that way if it spikes worse you won’t be taking it for nothing.”

The captain considered and I didn’t insist- it was his command. “Half on the other side, half in here. We’ll rotate every fifteen.” They nodded at the wisdom of that and filed back through to the other world, where somebody had thoughtfully set up chairs and a bit of an armory for them if they should happen to need it. While they were moving and out of earshot, I tapped the captain on the shoulder. “What’s the reaction going to be if this turns out to be a… nuclear event? That wind’s not _natural_ but whatever is on the other side might have human causes.”

He nodded, thinking quickly. “We’ll deal with it if it comes to that. Better to know, I think. But this doesn’t feel like nukes to me. Feels like… looking past the end of the world.” That was odd- it wasn’t just me getting that feeling in the back of their mind, then? Either way, he told the driver to press on and the APC rumbled to life down highway 95, or rather, what was left of it.

It was an unpleasant journey. Eighty mile per hour winds didn’t much phase a tracked vehicle, but the occasional _SPANG_ as something like a tree branch or piece of building debris smacked off the side was jarring, and the ride itself was alarmingly bumpy- the road had been torn to pieces by weeks of high winds. Still the remaining concrete path made for reliable enough guidance, and the driver performed admirably. I watched helplessly as the exterior rad counter spiked higher and higher. Deep in the wind wall, we were pushing a hundred thousand microseiverts per hour. My stupid rule system protected me- Pathfinder treated radiation like a _poison,_ and a fort save that I could pass in my sleep was enough to prevent any effects at all. But for the others- this was rapidly approaching life-altering levels of radioactivity. Nobody was going to be operating outside this vehicle for more than seconds, with an immediate _Neutralize Poison_ from me on return.

Then for a second it peaked, spiking so high the counter stopped reading, and my world _tilted_ on its axis. Like we’d just driven over a cliff, but there was no freefall afterwards- we continued plodding on. Was it radiation or something else? I looked up, alarmed, and the others had felt it too. Just as suddenly it was gone. “The hell was that?” asked the driver. “Felt like the world… _rebooted_ or something.” He and the captain peered out while the rest of us huddled in the back, but the winds were still too fierce to see anything.

I, on the other hand, was still on my knees in the back cabin. Something was terribly wrong. I wasn’t supposed to _be here_. My whole body was hurting- the world itself was rejecting my presence. “Captain, I-” I tried to get out, and then I puked. Everything was going grainy for me, like I was losing consciousness. On instinct I flung myself back at the portal. I hit the armored and padded wall of the APC, instead. The captain shouted in alarm and ran back to me.

“The hell was that?” he asked, but I had no answers. “The hell did the portal go? Half our team is on the other side of that! Did we just get fucked?” The other two in the cabin with him stared in alarm. I couldn’t say. Something felt _wrong_ with me. There were glowing worms creeping across the bottom of my vision, and the graininess hadn’t dissipated. But I could still talk. I felt a moment of rising panic as I realized my magic wasn’t working. This wasn’t just a wave of radiation. 

“I think we _were_ looking at the end of the world. I think we just crossed… into somewhere _else_. And it doesn’t like my… rules,” I panted, aching in strange ways. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I don’t fit. Can we turn this thing around?”

“Fuck! We need to see what’s on the other side of this wind, first,” he ordered, and the driver moved to comply- I didn’t complain further. We needed to _know_ and I wasn’t dying, just uncomfortable. We’d press on. Another hard half hour passed. My vision didn’t clear, but the radiation climbed back down to momentarily survivable levels. It wasn’t until I tried to cast a spell that the worms in my vision resolved and I realized they had been trying to talk to me all along in the form of Heads-Up messages. “ERROR: Skill not found” they reported.

“Oh no,” I muttered, even as the winds cleared and we saw beyond for the first time. “I really _don’t_ fit. Not here.” Fighting rising panic, I felt for something in my pocket- _what_ I was looking for I couldn’t understand, couldn’t actually think about, but it was still there. I breathed out in relief and tried to look past the driver. As far as we could see, a blasted and irradiated wasteland stretched. Distantly I could make out some outposts along the highway- they looked like they’d been abandoned for centuries. Anemic-looking sunlight filtered through the grainy air, and everything _glowed_ a soft and subtle yellow-green. It looked like… “A video game.” The clues were adding up. Radiation, a capital wasteland, a storm centered around… _Bethesda, Maryland._ The others looked at me curiously. They weren’t seeing the visual artifacts, apparently. It even _looked_ pixelated, to me.

We knew, now. I’d seen enough. “Captain, we aren’t going to find anyone here. We’ve crossed out of our world and into the _Fallout_ universe. It’s set hundreds of years after nuclear disaster. If there’s anyone alive out here, they aren’t the people we’re looking for.”

He sized me up while the others sat silently. Suspicions were starting to come to the fore, now that things had gone so badly. “I don’t have a _clue_ what you’re talking about. You laid out the rules for us, how these stories work. Someone in our world has to invite the Extras in. You telling me someone overwrote the whole of _Washington DC_ with a… video game world? I think you’re shitting me.”

None of my perception or persuasion skills were working. And his disbelief was seriously aggravating after all we’d been through. “Roy I’m just as mystified as you. This shouldn’t be possible. It felt like a _hole in the world_ that we drove through. _Look outside_ \- no person did this, not in a month. This is something new, something unfamiliar. We just walked into someone else’s story and it is sending me every possible flag that I _shouldn’t be here_. There’s nothing for us here but danger and death. The other half of our team is trapped on the other side of that portal, and… the game rules that I work on don’t _translate,_ here. I haven’t got the slightest bit of muscle to lend you. This isn’t our world and it’s beyond saving. We need to _leave_ while we still can. When we’re back, we can figure out what caused this.” _And how much more fucked the world is than we previously thought._

He sighed. “You’re asking me to take a lot on faith, Haley. We talked about this, before I came down here. I said I could _probably_ trust you. But there’s a lot of wiggle room in that _probably_. And here I am, safe on one side of the wind wall but cut off from half the team and my biggest muscle, apparently. I ask you- if you _did_ have something to hide about the capital, what do _you_ think that’d sound like? You trying to spook me?”

I lost my temper, shouted at him. “Captain, use your goddamn mind, it’s why you came on this mission! If I were the kind of murderer you _think_ I am, why would I be begging you? I’d have eaten you and driven back by myself.” They all tensed- _that was_ _not the right thing to say, Haley, you idiot_. “I’m _not going to do that,_ come on! What have I ever done that makes it seem like I’d behave that way?” The team around me didn’t relax. The answer wasn’t even that hard to come by- I’d done it just a few hours ago.

His hand was drifting close to his sidearm. “We drive on. You put me in charge of this mission?” I nodded in confirmation. “We drive on.” And so we did- rolling down a dusty, broken highway into hell.


	35. Interlude - Call To Adventure

\----

Contact Team 13, Volo Ingenium

\----

“Hey, what the fuck!” shouted Matt Cooper, formerly _Sergeant_ Cooper of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police. He’d been watching the interior of their APC through the _Gate_ as it drove through the middle of some kind of fucked-up hell storm, when that woman Haley had collapsed to the ground and the thing had cut out. He and the other 2 caught on this side raced over, but there was nothing they could do. “I didn’t even know these things _could_ fail,” said his squad-mate, Nina Lafuentes. She heaved at it- and she could apply quite a bit of force, despite her tiny frame, he knew very well from their rugby matches- but the thing didn’t move an inch from where it hovered. “We got any kind of like, freaky magic tech support? Call ‘em and tell em we’re stuck up a mile-high fuckin _tree_ and the door just turned off.”

They puzzled over it momentarily, but none of them really had a clue. Matt was about to send Nina back to base-camp by foot to rally some help while he and Charlie held position by the portal, when shit went FUBAR. At first it began as a distant wailing, like an air-raid alarm, but there were no visible emitters. It cut through the air from all directions at once, and increased in pitch and intensity. “The fuck is that?” Asked Charlie, one of the two American soldiers they’d been partnered with. “Sounds like a goddamn tornado siren from hell.” It _kept getting louder_ , until they had all fallen to their knees and covered their ears, overwhelmed by the sound of it. It was like the world itself was shrieking, stressed along some fault line they couldn’t detect.

And then- it _broke_. There was no earthquake, no movement of the ground, but they were all thrown off their feet anyway as reality _sheared_ and split. Matt had seen one of the giant winged lizards they called handmaidens summon one of the Efreets once, a week or so back, and the light felt the same as what had come off of that ritual, but if that was someone lighting a candle this was a _nuclear bomb_. He screamed into the rough bark of the gigantic branch they crouched on, trying to ride out the intensity of it- at long last the noise stopped, but even as it did so they were buffeted by a tremendous wind blast and for the first time since he’d climbed one of these ridiculous things he felt like he might fall off. He hung on for dear life and didn’t even _try_ to grab at the equipment tables as they blew over and took most of the weaponry with them.

Finally it died, and they checked themselves over. “Everyone okay? Police your shit, did we lose anything?” Matt shouted, but the other two were fine. “Hey, did it get… darker…” Nina started to ask before trailing off, and Matt turned to see what she was looking at. The horizon of this bizarre tree-world was confusing to look at- it curved _upwards_ so you could see hundreds of miles in any direction. The gate network had been placed right at the center of the Extra’s cities and colonies, their rough sphere of influence, so Matt and his crew had a pretty good ring-side seat for what was taking place. He found himself staring into the sky, where an entire _city_ hung in the air.

It was like someone had cut the top off a mountain, turned it upside down, and built the entirety of Agrabah from the Aladdin movies on top of it. That was his first thought, looking at the slender towers and bulbous onion-dome shapes of its palaces and redoubts. But it was no cartoon city- it was _huge_ , miles wide, large enough to house millions, and it was on _fire_. Every square meter of it- lava ran over the edges like waterfalls, flames licked the sides of the tall towers, crowned the palaces in huge circular waves. It didn’t look like a disaster- it looked like it was _built_ that way. Around it orbited dozens of smaller rocks, practically asteroids- each easily big enough to house this entire tree and then some. It hung in the air above them, so large that he felt like gravity might shift, like he might be pulled up into the air towards it. The lava was falling from the rim towards… well, _everywhere_ and he wasn’t entirely sure it was going to miss the tree, but what could he do? Against _that?_ Running would make no difference, it would-

Nina was tapping his arm but he didn’t look until she punched him. “ _WHAT”_ he shouted, turning to her again, and then immediately shut up.

The flying city wasn’t alone.

There were _two more_ that he could see, hundreds of miles distant, each apparently positioned over what he vaguely recalled were important Hive cities containing many of the high-tech Extras, not just their refugee populations.  “We have to get out of here,” he started to say, all thought of the portal and his friends on the other side forgotten. But then the air crackled again and the city _spoke_. The world’s loudest sound system roared to life and a voice thundered through the air, so heavy that the humans were forced to the ground for a second time.

It was deep, and male, and thoroughly, powerfully evil. If he’d heard it on TV he’d have thought the writers were going a little over the top with the cartoon villainy- as it was, he felt like whoever was speaking _clearly_ had the flying-fortress chops to back it up. “ _VOLO INGENIUM,”_ the voice boomed, and Matt thought he remembered some Extras referring to the whole planet like that- must be a general address, then. “I AM LORD IVAH OF THE BRASS CITY. WE ARE THE ARCHITECTS OF YOUR WORLD. AND NOW WITH THE MOST COWARDLY FLIGHT OF YOUR GOD AND GREATEST DEFENDER… ITS MASTERS.”

“Who the fuck is he talking about?” shouted Charlie. Matt was just as stumped as he was. “I think he means that Haley chick, didn’t Roy say she was the one who like, magic’d all this up?” questioned Nina.

A thought occurred. “Wait, does that mean she’s _gone_? Whatever happened with that portal- did she just bail on us?” Matt asked. Roy had seemed worried about the possibility, based on what the captain had said in private- but _this_ was a fucking-over on a level he hadn’t thought possible. Either she’d dicked the whole _world_ over… _or she was holding all this back, and something just happened._ Oh shit. “We’ve _really_ got to get out of here,” he said, this time acting on it, hauling the other two to their feet. He thought better of immediate flight, pausing to go through the mess of their equipment for the most lethal weaponry they had. Haley had been pretty adamant about non-lethal force, but they weren’t _idiots-_ there were some decently high powered rifles scattered about on the ground, and he equipped his team as best he could before they moved on. Meanwhile that ear-melting Shere Khan impersonator kept right on speaking. Matt only caught the tail end, though.

“WE DO NOT COME IN PEACE, VOLO INGENIUM. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO ABANDON YOUR POSITIONS, LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS, AND FLEE OR SURRENDER. WE HAVE SPOKEN.” The voice cut off and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

“We can’t just run off!” shouted Nina, as it ended. “What if that door opens back up and rest of the unit comes through into… _that?”_ Matt agreed, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

“Can we block the door or blow it up somehow? We can’t hold it, Nina- I don’t care if those cities haven’t got a single gun, their _air conditioning_ is probably going to kill us in the next ten minutes.” Indeed the lavafalls were touching down around them now, and everywhere they landed was catching fire. The trees were Extra-built, they’d probably withstand it, but the people _on_ them wouldn’t. From the high perch Matt could see movement down at the base of the trees, humans evacuating and Extras setting up inscrutable equipment. Well, not _entirely_ inscrutable. “Holy shit, the E.T’s were _packing,”_ breathed Charlie as he caught sight of the same thing. Around the rim of every tree, great gun emplacements were being uncovered. _Huge_ things, artillery-pieces, but made with forked barrels and hollow centers, like science-fiction laser cannons. The air was beginning to darken with flyers as well, though they hadn’t fired a shot yet. Struck with inspiration, Matt grabbed a white towel and began waving it at several of the nearest until one banked away from the formation and hovered near-silently over to him.

They were eerie things, the “Dragonfly” air cars. Bulbous and proportioned like a helicopter that didn’t need to bother with a primary or tail rotor, they glided through the air on some force that he didn’t understand. He’d been creeped out by them in the past- nothing so big should be so _quiet_. But he was grateful for this one, in the moment. The infomorph drone that popped out of the side once it slid open was _also_ carrying a weapon, a much smaller version of those same guns. “You folks need a lift out of here? I’m Shamutt,” it said, in perfect English. Along the walkway of the branch, lifeless drone robots began to come awake, no doubt animated by the same soldier that was giving instructions to the craft and talking to them now. Matt had worked with them several times and really envied their ability to be in a dozen places at once.

“We’ve got people on the other side of that portal,” Matt said hurriedly, gesturing at the empty hoop behind them. “It closed on us, we can’t let them stumble through later, can you like… blow it up, or something?” He felt stupid asking the Extras for help but honestly he was out of options, and this tree network was their show to begin with. Theirs, and that Haley woman’s, and she didn’t seem like she’d be coming back soon.

“The portal _closed_? That shouldn’t- let me check, one moment” said the drone, seemingly more alarmed by that than the pending invasion. A second later an expression that Matt had learned from experience was basically a look of extreme shock seemed to pass over its face. “Sabotage! It’s been dispelled. Who would-” then it settled back down just as quickly. “Oh, you’re with _her_. Strange things do tend to happen when she’s involved. But it’ll all work out. Nobody’s going to get the better of The Dragon.” The drone was speaking with something uncannily like _religious awe._ “We were going to lock down all of the portals anyway, but we’ll be sure to keep this one safe in case she plans to reopen it. You can stay here and help or go back. We can’t seem to get in touch with the stadium right now, they cut out just before the Efreet jumped in.”

 _I’d call it rotten luck but this feels like suspiciously good timing on the part of the magic flying cities_. Matt looked at the others, a quick visual survey. Nobody wavered. They wouldn’t leave their companions on the other side if they could possibly defend them. _Though I can’t imagine that they’re doing anything half as dangerous as this_. He looked at the drone soldiers, now amassing near the portal where several more of those gun emplacements and other equipment besides had rapidly deployed from the Dragonfly and was self-assembling. The most interesting piece was what looked like an armored, glossy _shell_ that was swiftly growing around their portal. More air-cars were vectoring towards their location. Honestly, Matt had no idea if they stood a chance against the genies- _but_ , he thought- _if our threats in this new world are radiation storms and death fortresses, I don’t think I’ll mind having a few ET’s with laser guns by my side._ _And if worse comes to worse, I’ve got that envelope._

“We’ll be staying.”

\----

Harry And Hermione, Gryffindor Common Room

The Night Before Halloween

\----

Hermione was so _tired_ of Harry and Ron snubbing her, just because she believed in the rules! She was a reasonable girl- she saw how far Harry was getting by ignoring them. But it wasn’t _right_ , it was an unbearable injustice. He’d snuck out for a _duel_ and been _caught_ but here he was with a brand new broom, sitting in their common room like the cat that caught the canary! She glared at the two of them and Harry glared back. “I thought you were ignoring us?”

“Yeah,” said Ron. “Don’t stop now, it’s doing us so much good.” Hermione was _just_ about to march away with her nose in the air, but a flash of the feather on that broom caught her eye, and her meagre ability to keep her mouth shut finally snapped.

“ _You,”_ she said to Ron, “are a little _toady_. At least _he_ has the courage to break the rules, terrible as that is- what do you do, just follow along behind him? _Do_ something and then maybe I’ll give a toss what _you_ think about me. You’re no different from Crabbe and Goyle. ” Ron turned white as a sheet before fleeing the room. She felt bad, briefly, but- well, _somebody_ had to say it. Boys, honestly.

Harry glared at her as she sat down. They were the only two in earshot, which was more or less how she wanted it. “Hermione that was unfair, even for you. I know you’re mad at us but Ron’s a proper bloke, he’s been a big help to me, and-”

She was still in full furor, her frizzy hair blasting out emphatically as she scolded him- “And _nothing_. You’re famous Harry, you need to understand how that _warps_ people. You lived in the… the real world, you’ve seen tv!” He flinched for some reason- she ignored it and carried on, “People are going to want to be around you because you’re… _you_ , because of your legend, even perfectly good people will end up riding your coat tails.”

Harry shook his head angrily. “He’s not like that! He was the only one here who didn’t _care_ about some dumb stories from when I was a baby.” He eyed her, and the way her eyes kept glancing back to the feather at the end of his new broom. “But this isn’t really about Ron, is it?”

She grimaced. “Not just about Ron. Even… _adults_ can be drawn in by fame. Harry I don’t know if anyone has told you but- if you’re being _abused_ , you can _talk_ to someone. This world is insane but they’ll still take that _seriously-”_

He leapt up from the couch. “I never said _anything_ about abuse! I can take care of my own problems! What’s done is done and I’m _never_ going back there!” He turned to storm away but paused when he saw how bewildered Hermione was becoming. Others turned, at the outburst, but nobody interrupted just yet.

“What are you _talking_ about,” she hissed. “I meant _Snape,_ and the _feather_. Harry is something happening to you at _your home?_ ” _How deep does this rabbit-hole go,_ she wondered? She wasn’t old or mature enough for this, this needed a teacher’s assistance immediately! If it was his adoptive parents- _no wonder he doesn’t trust authority_.

He laughed out loud, partially in relief, and collapsed back into an arm chair. “ _Snape?_ We just… just _talked,_ Hermione. He knew my mother. When he got me alone…” there was a wondering look in his eyes. “It was like he totally changed. He was so much gentler. He knew my _parents,_ Hermione. He… told me stories, about her.”

She looked at him skeptically. “And that’s all? It doesn’t strike you as _odd_ that he treats you like dirt in public, and talks to you like that in private?” She’d read all the literature on the subject and that sounded like _textbook_ “Grooming” behavior to her. He lived in a dungeon, he fiddled with chemicals all day! How many more red flags for a child predator did you need!

Harry smiled shyly, and it struck her that she couldn’t really recall seeing _that_ expression on his face even once. “No. I don’t understand it yet, but he’s not a threat. He’s… _troubled,_ and _mysterious_. But I think I can help him. I just need to get him alone again.” That sounded like a _perfectly terrible_ idea to Hermione but before she could open her mouth to say so, the common room door banged open and Cormac Mclaggen stormed through.

“Monkey-loving _mugglefucker_!” He shouted, throwing his books at a wall, prompting a shout from the Head Boy. “He did it again!” Several other wizards groaned but he stormed past them, muttering profanities the whole way. Hermione blushed crimson. She had been learning so _many_ wizard swears in the last few weeks.

“What was that all about?” Asked Harry. Cormac was a year ahead of them, so they hadn’t had much contact, but even _he_ knew that displays of temper like that were unusual, to say the least.

Hermione huffed and crossed her arms. “You hadn’t heard? That boy everyone thought was a squib, Sean Peakes from Hufflepuff? He got… _really_ good, out of nowhere. Blew right through our first year classes in just a couple of weeks.” Hermione was _extremely_ jealous of this. They wouldn’t let _her_ advance a whole year and she had been the best in the class- they kept telling her she needed to let her magic take time to grow and expand, so why was _his_ so strong? “He went from not being able to cast a thing, to throwing around spells like _Dumbledore_ used to do when _he_ was a first year.” That didn’t just happen, there _had_ to be something foul afoot.

“Bet it had something to do with Draco, the little git,” said Harry. “He’s always mooning about after Peakes like he thinks the rest of us don’t notice. I swear I even overhead him getting something from Snape to _put in his food_.”

Hermione smacked her head. “And you didn’t _say anything?_ Harry it’s one thing to try and tolerate your _own_ abuse but you can’t just overhear that sort of thing without saying something!” She wasn’t at all incensed because it was clearly some kind of magic supercharging potion, no! This was about protecting the student body!

He shrugged. “What was I going to do? Dumbledore won’t let anything bad happen in Hogwarts, and I don’t think Snape would help, even for his favorite _Draco_.” There was a hint of jealousy in his voice there, she noted. “If it’s really bothering you I’ll try to warn Sean tomorrow.”

She nodded. “Good, at least I can help _one_ student. And Harry… you’ll tell me if Snape does anything you’re not… _ready_ for, won’t you? You don’t have to handle it alone.”

He nodded, still puzzled. “I can handle myself Hermione.” He got up to walk away, and she heard him mutter in a voice she thought she wasn’t meant to hear, “I can handle _him_ , too.”

\----

Dog and Greg, At The Tower

\----

Greg rubbed his head blearily, and looked at the striped blue canine sitting lazily in front of him. “Anyone get the number o’ that lorry?” he ventured half-heartedly, trying to make a joke of the bone-deep ache in his skull. All he remembered was a mind-numbing half second of terror as that dragon woman had blazed after him at impossible speeds, and then- nothing. “ _Blimey,_ she don’t pull no punches, eh?”

The dog looked skeptical. “ _You_ ended up with the One Ring, somehow? They don’t make hobbits like they used to.” Around them the bustle of the stadium’s field hospital and general logistics operations continued. People had learned to ignore little things like talking animals, in the last month. At the mention of the ring, Greg’s heart skipped a beat and he clutched at his pockets- _it was gone!_ He swung around wildly until the dog jerked its’ nose upwards, where a small and boxy robot was hovering silently. “It’s in there, and there it will _stay,_ Greg the Hobbit, until we get it back to Middle Earth. You and I are going to have a _fellowship_.”

Greg glared angrily at him. “Now look ‘ere, you can’t go dictatin’ the disposition of that ring, it’s a bleedin’ family heirloom! So wha’ if it’s a little bit dangerous? Say what happened with...” he gestured helplessly “all that, anyway? I guess she didn’t want it after all?”

The Dog shook his head exasperatedly, reaching up to clamp his jaws around the hem of Greg’s pants and tug him to his feet. He was still fully clothed, thank goodness, but he wasn’t really ready to just hump it all the way back home to his house and the mysterious door to the Shire. “She _wanted_ it and she _got_ it, you fool, and then it very nearly destroyed her and everything she’s built here. Be thankful that she was still reasonable enough to let it go before it did. That ring is _worse_ than radioactive and we’re _all_ in danger until it goes back home.”

Greg began walking but continued his sulk. “We can’t just… _give it back,_ don’t the people of the Shire matter to yas? You throw that ring back through the door, you’re giving it to _Sauron_ , and _then_ what’s gonna happen?”

The Dog gave a canine sort of shrug, leading him out of the open medical pavilion. “You tell me- it’s _your_ story. Disposing of rings is part and parcel of living in that world as a _hobbit_ , and it’s _your_ problem, not mine. If you wanted everything to work out alright, you should have left well enough alone- the original outcome was about as good as you might get. But you didn’t. Some perversity took you to _steal_ the damned thing and bring it here. Haley might have more sympathy for your plight, but _I-”_ the dog grinned and it was nothing but teeth, “have no problem feeding you back to the wolves. Now, come.” He made quick loping strides toward the gigantic portal, the entrance to the gate network. The little drone robot followed along behind him obediently.

Greg was about to dig in his heels, to _truly_ make a scene, when he noticed something strange. In the traffic around the gate, a party of people was shuffling through- their _eyes_ were strange. Glowing blue, and they were unfurling- _banners_? He couldn’t quite make out the design on them, the distance and angle weren’t right, but they seemed to fascinate everyone who saw them- people around them stood transfixed. He noticed as well that the party carrying the banners was made up of all sorts- it looked like some of the armed and armored teams he’d passed on his _first_ trip through the gate network, as well as people in civilian clothes. “What’s all that?” he asked, peering unhelpfully at the things they were showing. 

The Dog _yelped_ in terror and whirled back to him. “ _For god’s sake don’t_ **_look_** _at it,”_ he hissed, before darting off in the exact opposite direction. Greg whined in protest but turned to follow, tethered to the drone carrying his ring like a mule on a lead. “They aren’t supposed to _be_ here,” the Dog muttered, practically to itself. “I don’t know what they _are_ but I can feel the… wrongness of this. The story is _altering,_ how-”

“You’re not the only one with access to oracles,” said a man in a flowing grey robe, striding out of thin-air nearly in front of them. He spoke with a rough British accent and he had the most _magnificent_ bushy black beard Greg had ever seen. _Alan Moore would be envious,_ he thought. But this wasn’t Gandalf- there was something hard in his eyes, cruel, and he looked like he was here on business. The Dog snarled and raised its hackles but the man simply raised his hand, his eyes flashing as he did so, and a cage of glowing force sprang up around it. “None of _your_ tricks, thank you very much. The _ring,_ if you please Greg, of your own free will.” The little drone chirruped and cracked apart, dropping the ring between them at Greg’s feet.

The Dog turned to him. “ _Don’t do it you fool. That’s Merli-”_ a muzzle clamped around his mouth. He paused briefly as if gathering himself for something, and parts of his body turned translucent before snapping _back_ to solidity. He collapsed to the bottom of the cage. Greg turned, looked over his shoulder for other options. Distantly across the field, the people who’d been standing mesmerized by the banners were now walking with the blue-eyed newcomers. _All_ of their eyes were blue, he realized. They were spreading out to block the exits, flashing those signs at anyone they could reach. A few people were running, but the vast majority had been hypnotized in seconds. He could only assume the elderly wizard in front of him was part of the same events, though _his_ eyes were not glowing, at least.

The wizard was still talking like he’d read Greg’s mind. “No, we are spared their direct control for the time being. We are more useful with our minds intact. But it _did_ quite effectively capture our narrators. Normally they’d be immune to such things as well, but there’s just something _about_ this disease that doesn’t _fit_. It comes from the infomorphs and much about them seems to cross boundaries. Including their maladies. It found vectors of infection unique to each of our stories and once it had the people holding our leashes, well- there’s only so much we can do about _that._ You’re a narrator yourself, aren’t you Greg? We’re not really sure what would happen if we forced you to hand over the ring using the Concept. Better you do it of your own free will. Please hurry Greg, I’d dearly hate to have to kill your friend here. Such an _interesting_ specimen.” The force cage around the Dog began to tighten- he, for his part, only glared at the ancient magician.

 _He could just take it if he wants it so badly_ , thought Greg. There wasn’t a courageous bone in his body but even _he_ could feel this for the setup that it was. Still, what choice did he have? He reached down slowly, carefully, never taking his eye off of the man that he now assumed was Merlin. Picked up the ring. Stood back to his full five-foot height. The grey-cloaked stranger continued to hold out his hand, otherwise still and solid as an ancient oak. Greg looked at it, back to his face. Totally impassive, a mask betraying nothing. _I hope this doesn’t go as badly as last time._ In one smooth motion he slipped the ring on his finger, and vanished into the wildly-whipping shadows of the _other_ realm.

Merlin blinked, and closed his hand. “Ah. Pity. It _appears_ we’ve lost him. Whatever shall we do,” he mused to the Dog at his side. Without another word or gesture the cage simply burst into flames, and the Dog _howled_ in pain.

Greg said his apologies under his breath as he ran. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I don’t know how to _help_ you I came here to get _her_ help everything’s gone wrong I’m sorry,” but it was the longest time before he drowned out the cries of the wounded animal he was leaving far behind.


	36. Chapter 36

\----

Haley, Capital Wasteland

Present Day

\----

It didn’t take long, before hell found us. We drove across the barren wasteland that should have been our capital for what felt like hours. The crew muttered and I poked at my interface. This whole phenomenon was new. Previously we’d seen narrators summon characters and even story elements into our world. Whoever had summoned this had _replaced_ our world, intentionally or not. Old DC was just- gone. In its place this horrifying vision of a future that could never have been. The age of the storms would seem to indicate that this had appeared at the same time as the other story elements, but I wondered- were there other places like this, where the fabric of our reality was coming apart like old cloth, revealing near facsimiles underneath? What would happen if the person driving this place were to die and lose control of it? _Was_ there a person driving it? Questions without answers, for now.

The… metaphysics of this world, I guessed, didn’t expand far enough to allow _other_ game systems to exist. My Pathfinder statistics had translated into some kind of _level_ system, and I had… quite a few of them. My pile of hit dice had proven to be good for _something,_ I guessed. If I used all these points I was probably quite lethal compared to your average human, but I had no illusions about invulnerability here. I distributed what I could, maxing out anything that could give me more skill points early on, then anything that would improve my gunplay. If this really was Fallout then I had a good idea what was going to go down when we finally got out of this vehicle. I hadn’t even _played_ the games but it was hard to escape some understanding just through cultural osmosis. A lot of shooting and dismemberment, unless I missed my guess.

I maxed small guns and sneak, leaving the rest for future contingencies. My first option would be a stealth approach, but if it came time for violence, I wanted to hit anything I shot at. Meanwhile the rest of the crew peered at the displays that substituted for windows in the armored tub, and tried to make out where we were. “This doesn’t look anything like 95” muttered the captain, trying to puzzle out our location on his paper map. Honestly I hadn’t even realized they printed those anymore, but it wasn’t going to be much good here. “I don’t get it, it looks like a bomb went off and everyone just rebuilt from the nearest trash laying around,” grumbled the driver.

“That’s the aesthetic of the Fallout universe, yeah” I said, going through our small-arms locker and trying to find something useful. Roy glared at me suspiciously and I shrugged at him. _I’m not going out there without self defense._ “They never put much thought into it- hundreds of years after the bombs fell and everyone still living with holes in their roofs and sheet-metal nailed to their walls, it always seemed like a ham-handed way to signal apocalypse conditions to me.” I grabbed a taser and as many charges as I could fit in my pockets. I didn’t even have the Vorpal Sword here- I’d left it at the stadium in my treasure hoard, after the events with the Ring. I felt like I might as well have been naked.

Finally we found a place that looked… active, for lack of a better term. A great big shopping mall done in a future-retro 60s sci-fi style, then blown to pieces, then reassembled from barbed wire and driftwood. There was a statue of some alternate-universe ice cream mascot standing tall over the place and holding up a cone, but his nose had rotted off and the whole thing had taken on a vaguely skeletal appearance. A weathered and broken billboard along the single entryway said “Paradise Falls.” The road itself was lined with fences and obstacles, turning it into an almost perfect one-way road, straight into the heart of the mall proper. This couldn’t be more obviously a trap.

I said as much. “Stow  it,” said the captain. “We haven’t seen hide or hair of a single person so far. They look like they’ve had a rough month in here. If anyone’s alive I bet they’ll be grateful for us. And whatever they built all this to defend _against…_ well, we’re not it. We go in, get the locals to tell us what’s been going on, and then we get back out. _If_ your story’s on the up-and-up… I’ll owe you an apology. But it sure as hell looks like _something_ magic went down, out there.”

I crossed my arms. This was several steps too far, despite my respect for him. “Okay. You drive into the kill zone, in a box that’s too big to reverse easily. But let me out here. I’ll take another path into the place. I can go pretty much unnoticed, and if they’re unfriendly you’ll have someone on the outside ready to help you.” To demonstrate I crouched to activate my new unbelievably-high “Sneak” mode and more-or-less disappeared from their perceptions for an instant. Once they had calmed down about _that,_ they considered, agreed, and lowered the ramp. I turned to go- “Listen. If some of us don’t make it back from this… no.” I shook my head. “I promise, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure all of you come back from this.” They stared silently. Having said that, I found myself stepping out of the back of the APC before it rumbled down the narrow, winding road lined with sandbags and tall fences capped with barbed wire. Within seconds it was out of sight.

I began picking my way through debris and rubble towards the structure of the mall itself. Everything about this was sitting poorly with me. The growing distrust of my team, I understood- but not their inability to recognize how out of place all of this was. _None_ of this looked like the world they were used to. We had clearly stepped into someplace _else_ , with different rules. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe not having their own story logic was making them susceptible to the madly skewed perspective that this game world clearly ran on. A brief discussion with Sean from our time at the bunker, about the nature of all the “non-player characters” in our stories came to mind, and I shuddered. It was really unsettling to think that everyone around you might not have their own free will, their own agency. I still rejected the concept outright. If I had any narrative authority here whatsoever, I’d give them their minds.

I heard the APC enter the main yard of the mall, and the engine cut out. Now that the vehicle had passed, I could see people rising from blinds and hidden foxholes by the roadside and swiftly dragging barricades across it. _Uh-oh, that doesn’t look friendly_. The people didn’t look great either- like some combination of desert raider and _Mad Max_ cosplayer, covered in leathers and torn strips of clothing. The vast majority were wearing blinking, bulky collars. I was genre-savvy enough to guess that those were going to be some kind of bomb-collars. A slaving operation, then. I snuck close and listened to their interactions from behind some rubble, to make sure.

“Get moving you assholes, you let them escape and Eulogy’s gonna have _all_ our asses,” snarled one of the only guys without a collar on, as he shoved a couple of them around. _Yeah definitely video game slavers._ I was going to have a hard time not killing any of them on principle. If it came to a fight, I’d make it happen somehow.

One of the ones with a collar, a slim woman who looked like she’d seen some hard years, muttered rebelliously. “Not like Eulogy’s in charge round here anymore, _anyway._ ” To her great misfortune the guy with the detonator heard her. He swung around and pointed a device and I heard her shout “No! No! I didn’t mean-” before a soft _pop_ removed everything about her from the neck up. Gore splashed her comrades and stained the road underneath her as the body collapsed.

He turned to the rest of them. “I don’t want to hear that shit from _none of you,_ you get me? Eulogy’s got his finger on your triggers, don’t matter who or what he works for, he’s _your_ own personal god, got it?” They nodded rapidly and he turned away, satisfied. I felt sick. I couldn’t imagine they were making a habit of killing slaves for such minor offenses, which either meant the situation was _very_ unstable, or… _that was exposition for my benefit by the world itself?_

I didn’t know if this place had a narrator. It seemed like a _setting_ , not a story, necessarily. But I could see it being the kind of setting that, on some level, simply didn’t care about murdering NPC’s if it delivered a message to the protagonist. “Please don’t send your communications to me with an attached _body count_ ,” I hissed at nobody in particular as I resumed scaling the rubble to the back of the mall. I couldn’t be certain anyone was listening, but- “I don’t know if you’re a person or just the rules this world operates on but you and I may have a very different opinion on the value of a life, and if you keep killing people just to _talk_ to me I will find you and _express it_.”

I seemed to have an instinctive understanding of whether or not any of them could see me and I leaned on it, moving swiftly whenever they weren’t looking in order to cover more ground. Interestingly enough I didn’t hear a single peep from the APC- not voices, not gunfire. I wondered if the interior of the mall was on pause until I got there. This world had unsettled me when we first arrived in it but I was beginning to think I hadn’t been scared _enough_. _I don’t understand the rules of this place. We need to load up and get out._

Sure enough when I finally worked my way around the rubble piles and onto the second story of the mall, I heard a conversation beginning. It made no sense- the APC had arrived several minutes ago, they had _plenty_ of time- I shook my head to dismiss such thoughts and listened. Roy’s voice rang through air- “Captain Kitchener, Contact team 13, here to assess the situation and offer you assistance. Who are we speaking to?” I poked around a corner and finally saw them. They were parked in the center of what used to be the mall parking lot but had at some point become the town square for the shanties that dotted the area. In front of my team were arrayed a dozen armed men, and more took up positions on the balcony around me. All were dressed in wasteland leathers except for the man in front, who seemed _remarkably_ out of place. He looked like a clone of James McAvoy, wearing a three-piece oxford suit with not one hair out of place. He had a confidence and control about him that marked him as the one in charge without him raising a finger. At his side paced an enormous snow leopard, totally incongruous to the situation. _This must be the guy who took over from Eulogy, then. Looks like a Bond villain._

The man that I assumed was named Eulogy stood right behind him, in a wasteland-chic worn red suit. All his attention was fixated on the well-dressed man, but as he moved around I caught sight of his face and my breath hitched- his eyes were _glowing_. A soft blue light came from them. What could _that_ mean? Once again I shook my head. Whatever was going on here, I needed to focus. This was going to end one way- _poorly_ , and I had an opportunity to mitigate the damage. I had a blackjack among my effects and the ability to go more-or-less unseen, and I moved to put it to work on the balcony, disabling as many people as I could before this turned into a gun fight.

I didn’t even make it to the first sniper before the man in the suit spoke and all thought fled, for a moment. He had a crisp English accent that clearly spoke of an upper-class upbringing, but it was _what_ he said that caused my brain to crash and reboot. “Lord Asriel, of Jordan College and the Royal Arctic Society,” he said with a touch of grim humor, “Though, of late, I have not been in touch with either.” I was already in full-on panic mode. Everything I knew about the _Golden Compass_ flashed past me- he was another world-walker, like Flagg, but Asriel’s motives had been even more ambitious, and by-and-large he had _succeeded_.

I hesitated behind the man I was about to ambush. Asriel was ambitious to the point of madness to be sure, but he might still see that it was to his benefit not to murder a team in cold blood. We could possibly get out of this without bloodshed. 

“In fact,” he said, “We _could_ use your assistance. Have any of you seen something like this, before?” From his waistcoat he withdrew what looked like a wrist-mounted computer with a pulsing light coming from it- the screen was facing the wrong way, for me, but he flashed it toward Byers and his crew, and every single one of them stared at it, transfixed.” _Ah fuck, that can’t be a good sign._ Within seconds they’d all collapsed. _But he didn’t order them shot._

I considered the first gunman. _Jam my knife into his skull at a 45 degree angle, severing his vertebrae and scrambling his medula oblongata. He’ll drop without making a sound._ The knowledge came to me unbidden and I had no idea if it was the stealth skill or just my own morbidity talking. But… I wouldn’t. I’d only killed men once before, in a combat situation when my blood was up, and I still regretted it. This world so clearly _wanted_ me to kill. It clearly didn’t value these lives, and didn’t want me to either. The pressure to ease my path with murder was enormous. I wouldn’t give it the satisfaction, even with the odds so heavily stacked against me. I clubbed him hard in the back of the head instead, and dragged his unconscious body with me around the corner. Then I made for the second man on the balcony.

Down below the gunmen were not advancing on Byers or his team, oddly enough. They seemed to be waiting patiently for… _something_. I had enough time to club two more men unconscious, occasionally looking over the side to the courtyard below, before I found out what. The captain’s eyes snapped open, and they were glowing with that same soft blue light as Eulogy’s. “Ah, welcome back,” said Lord Asriel. “Coherent, I hope? The Concept has matured a little, but it is still… quite obstructive of the synaptic pathways.” _Whatever that was I don’t think it was local, but he used local tech to flash them- memetic attack, delivered via setting-relevant transmission?_ The other three in the captain’s group opened their eyes, all with that same glow, and stood unsteadily. Asriel continued. “Now, hopefully one of you still retains enough to talk. Was there anything you had prepared in case of capture? Any unpleasant surprises in the vehicle, or waiting outside?”

Roy nodded, slowly, and I cursed. He could barely form complete sentences, all of a sudden. “A woman. Haley. She… powers, not sure- careful.” I stepped up my speed, trying to club a fourth man.

Asriel’s eyebrows shot up at the name. “ _Her,_ here? When Emrys set the timetable I didn’t think for a second _she_ would be-” He caught himself, cleared his throat and turned to the others. “Find her. Shoot to kill.” Well, that was the end of any nonlethal amnesty for him from _me._ It was almost the end of me, period. The fourth man on the balcony turned the instant the order was given and spotted me immediately, given that I was just feet from him. He gave a warning shout and fired his rifle into the air, and that was my cover blown.

I dropped into the _other_ skill I had felt waiting for me, some sort of time-dilated targeting system that let me choose my shots with utmost precision. With small arms at 100, a taser from beyond this world, and every perk related to gunplay I could find, I was easily able to place three shots however I wanted. The fourth, fifth, and sixth men on the balcony all jerked as the prongs stung them and then the lightning arcs froze every muscle in their bodies. _That’s definitely not how a taser works._ I _hoped_ that headshots wouldn’t kill but I no longer had any kind of luxury of time. The seventh and final man on the balcony, around the interior corner from me, leveled his rifle but I ducked behind the thin sheet-metal siding of the balcony, which proved totally invulnerable to the return fire of his ramshackle automatic weapon. The little details of this world really unnerved me.

I heard the sound of the rest of the Mad Max gunmen in the courtyard below running to the stairwell. This position was untenable- the physics of this world made it advantageous for me to sneak away and kill these men one at a time, but he had my team, my ride out of here, and likely some answers. This world _wanted_ me to steal a gun off a body and become a vessel for somebody’s pent-up rage as I killed every one of these people. I could feel a pressure in the back of my mind trying to insist that the minute you picked up a gun and opposed a protagonist you were just nameless, faceless cannon fodder and your death was nobody’s fault but your own. I couldn’t accept that. Visions of the men I’d killed in Aslan’s army kept flashing through my mind- regrets I couldn’t erase. These men _meant_ something, even as my enemies, and I was not going to murder them if it was at all within my power. I crouched and headed back the way I’d come, grabbing the first man I’d clubbed unconscious on the way. Roy wasn’t in immediate danger. He’d have to fend for himself for a moment while I used my maxed-out Sneak to retreat.

Down the rubble pile we went, and far enough away that I thought I’d have at least a few minutes before they caught up. I could hear them calling out- ordinarily having lost sight of me they might have called off the search, but Asriel was driving them to form search parties, to come after me.

I slapped the man I’d brought until he woke up. I couldn’t worry about concussions now- he’d be alive, at least. As he woke up blearily I jammed the barrel of the taser under his chin, _hard_. “Raise your voice and I end you here and now.” I whispered. His eyes went wide and he nodded, unable to distinguish one barrel for another. “I want to know what you know about the guy in the suit down there. What’s he here for, what does he want?” _How does he know my name?_ If I wasn’t killing these slavers I might as well pump them for information.

The thug’s brow darkened- he was clearly not a fan of the man. “Bastard got here two days ago. Flashing that blue pipboy at anyone who crossed him- makes ‘em a zombie.” _That confirms it- he can ignore the barriers we’ve encountered for mind control if he spreads it with local tech. He’s a threat far beyond this world._ “He didn’t do all of us though, just the bosses- said he wanted _relatively intelligent_ workers. Asshole. He’s got us out scouting, pumping the wasteland for tech and scraps. He was real interested in the Brotherhood suits, taking some of that back where he came from. I don’t think he plans to keep us alive when he’s done.” He eyed me curiously. “What about you? You ain’t killed anyone yet.”

I nodded absentmindedly. _If he’s a story from our world’s disaster and oh I just_ know _he is, he must have come across some memetic strain and made use of it. What’s his goal? Why does it make them obedient to him? What’s he need wasteland technology for, or is this just opportunistic scavenging?_ “What’s your name? And how do you know I haven’t killed anyone?” I asked the thug.

He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes crossed. “I don’t- ain’t nobody ever asked me that. I gotta have a name, right?” The question was distressing him, he was starting to panic. I shook my head and dismissed it. Unsettling implications flashed through my mind again- _literally nameless thugs-_ but I tried to stay on target. He moved on and his eyes refocused- “we can see it, if you done bad shit like us. You’re clean.” _Clean in this world, anyway,_ I thought with a grimace. “Let me go, I’ll tell the others I didn’t see you.”

I really missed _Sense Motive_. “I can’t tell if you’re telling the truth or not. Why would you do that?”

He shrugged. “We kill you, we die in a couple days probably. When he’s done with us. You stop him, maybe something better happens. I’ll take my chances.” Not the most advanced moral calculus and I wasn’t happy about working with slavers and murderers but my top priority was escaping with my people and getting them help, somehow. Solving this society’s problems was going to be a distant tertiary for the time being, but I made a mental note about it. I let him up and he ran off, calling out to the others when he was a good distance away. Drawing them off. _Score one for mercy_.

I had a limited window where the courtyard might be uncovered but I was going to make use of it. Still crouching to keep my stealth up, I made my way back to the mall and down to the parking lot where Lord Asriel, the Contact team, and the APC were all still situated. He had a pistol in hand, I saw, but he didn’t seem to pick up on me immediately. His daemon was pacing around him, putting her finely tuned senses to use, but that gave me an idea. I began covering the distance while he spoke to the captain.

“And the Efreet, have they moved yet? No, no, of course you’d have no idea. _Damn_ , it’s been hell getting any information out here. The sooner we convert this whole place and get out, the better. No more faffing about, as soon as they get back I’ll convert them and we’ll simply roll the wasteland with Concept. I’ve seen… nothing to threaten it, here.” He said that last rather oddly. But the captain and my 3 teammates simply nodded along blankly. Whatever they’d been hit with… it had wiped them _right_ out. I could only hope their minds were recoverable if we escaped this. I was halfway across the parking lot to Asriel when his cat finally noticed that something was amiss. Her ears quirked and she growled “She’s here!” _Guess she doesn’t play by local rules. Shit._

I’d legitimately forgotten that daemons from Golden Compass could talk but that didn’t alter the plan. Before Asriel could sound the alarm or the others could raise their weapons I dropped back into that targeting system and planted all three taser shots into her. It occurred to me that tasers _really_ didn’t work this way, that it couldn’t discharge multiple blasts simultaneously, but the game world didn’t question it and I wasn’t about to look the gift in the mouth. She yowled and dropped as I raced towards her, and he stumbled back, momentarily stunned. I discarded the empty taser, grabbed the limp form of the cat and absorbed a bean-bag round to the right shoulder from the captain- at such close range it hit hard enough to knock me around and dislocate that arm, but not enough to stop me. Still holding the cat I lowered my other shoulder and barged straight through the other three of my former teammates and into the open side hatch of the APC, slamming it closed and locked as I did so. Two more shots flew in as I pulled it shut, rubber bullets- one clipped the side of my face in a ricochet and drew blood, but I was otherwise okay.

I took a moment while the cat was coming around to relocate my shoulder with a crack and a cry of pain. The others were trying to get into the APC but it was buttoned up pretty tight from the outside. I fished out my hunting knife and the handset for the external speakers, before setting up the confrontation I’d come here to make. “Asriel. Call them off. I’ve got your cat, and that means I’ve got _you_. She dies, you die, right? Back off and let’s talk.”

Watching through the external cams I could see him groan and shudder in revulsion at the thought that I was touching what was essentially the embodiment of his soul. Everyone in his world had one of these animal manifestations, and _he_ had pioneered the use of _severing_ them to power his ambitions- I wasn’t going to feel too badly about rough handling right now. But he waved the others away and they stood back from the vehicle. Even the goons now filtering back into the lot stood off. I wasn’t too worried about small arms fire in here, but the team outside was still vulnerable. He mastered himself and spoke, eventually. “ _Damn_ you, Emrys, you set me up.” I didn’t think that was meant for me. Through the cameras I saw him turn towards me. “You, Haley. What do you want?”

Well that was easy enough. “I want you to let them go, and I want to know why you’re _here_. How about this- I’ll drive along and you, and _they,_ are going to follow, because you can’t get too far from your cat without serious pain, can you? But that’s it- nobody else follows. We get outside of town and I’ll trade you, cat for my team, unharmed.” She was coming around and beginning to struggle in my arms- I could feel claws unsheathing. I pressed the knife close to her throat. “Ah ah ah, don’t get feisty. You might hurt me but I guarantee I’d take you with me.” She stilled for the time being.

He stood there, looking thoroughly nonplussed. Then he laughed. _God damn it they always laugh_. “Ah, all this and you don’t have a scrap of power to you right now! You would have been a _terror_ if you’d been born on my Earth! No wonder he was so worried about you.” Then he shook his head, almost sadly. “There is no letting them go. Their minds are _gone_ , and neither I nor anyone else… can restore them.” Again, that weird delay. _Sense Motive would be going crazy right now if I had it._ “If I could do you think I’d work so willingly for the Concept? It has my narrator too, you know. None of us are free while those telling our stories are held by it. While we could be taken at any time. We only remain free as a function of our utility.” _Well, fuck_. _Stay calm, don’t panic Haley, there are still options. Assuming he’s not bluffing. Get them back to your world, you have restoration magics._ “I don’t think I can let you out of here, knowing what you know,” he said. “There is about a ton of dynamite buried underneath you in this parking lot, and I have the lives of your team to bargain with as well. Try to move the vehicle and I detonate it.”

He was bluffing. “You’ll die too!” I shouted. He clearly wasn’t suicidal. “What’s your alternate proposal?” I was losing control of this situation, I felt. I _had_ to get the team in here, subdue them if I could, and get out. The second I was clear of his cat he was going to try to murder me, though, that much was clear.

“Ah well, perhaps I can just show you,” he said, and reached into his waistcoat to pull out- I knew where this was going. I slapped one hand over the porthole before he could meme me. I had no idea if it would impact me long-term, but _short-_ term was scary enough right now. With the other hand I reached down and cut an ear off the cat. She screamed, he screamed outside and collapsed again, and I flinched. She was actually the soul of a cruel, cruel man but it _felt_ like animal cruelty. And my hands were still covered in her blood as she thrashed and yowled. _This is not a good day._

But I kept my calm. “Try it again, you lose more than an ear. Negotiations closed for now. _You,_ the nameless NPC gunmen. Talking to you now.” The men behind him stood up straighter, and looked a little bit puzzled. “He’s going to kill you- or expose you to that meme- the second this is resolved. You answer one question for me, and I’ll remove the problem for you. Who’s holding the detonator for the explosives under this APC?”

They looked back and forth for a minute, clearly unsure what to do- then jumped as a single gunshot rang out, and Eulogy collapsed bonelessly, leaking gore from a neat hole in his head. The gunman who I was _pretty_ sure was the guy I’d interrogated earlier, shouted back at the APC. “Nobody, now.”

I nodded before I remembered they couldn’t see me. “Good enough. We’re leaving. Word of warning- I _will_ be back, about the slaves. If you’re still keeping them when I arrive- well, you may wish he’d zombified you.” I grabbed some emergency rope and hog-tied the hissing cat, then slid into the driver’s seat. We began at a very slow walking pace- just fast enough that Asriel had to break into a trot to keep up or risk feeling whatever that searing pain was, when his soul was pulled too far from his body. The zombies of my team shambled along behind him. Within a half minute we were off the parking lot asphalt, and no detonation had come. I breathed a sigh of relief. One half of this negotiation over, then. _But is there any way I can avoid murdering him?_ He was at my mercy now- stripped of power, for the time being.

“Why are you helping the Concept?” I asked, just to get him talking while we rolled forward, crushing through the trash barricades placed in between us and freedom. “That’s what you called it, right?”

He growled and cursed as he shambled and dragged himself over the barricades I was simply driving _through_. But he didn’t answer the questions. That was why I was so surprised when a mousy little voice inside the vehicle with me spoke up.

“He told you. He’s a coward!” I looked around, thinking perhaps it was his daemon, but no- there was _another_ talking animal in this cabin with me, a shrunken and hunched little field-mouse. I looked around wildly but didn’t see any other people. _What the hell?_ The mouse continued. “Anna summoned me, and also him, during that awful night, and within weeks everything there had fallen to them. She was so brave! She fought right to the bitter end. But if the… the _blue light_ gets ahold of a narrator… the story they’re telling doesn’t have much of a choice about where it goes.”

I stopped the APC- we were just outside of town. The external mic was on and he could hear this conversation, but that was fine. I wanted him to know he had a leak, and I needed to focus. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

The mouse stood up on its hind legs, _well_ away from the snow leopard, and sniffled. “Telantes, miss. I’m Anna’s daemon.”

Outside, Asriel cursed and spit, practically losing his mind. “You damned _rat_! You stowed away all this time!”

I held out a hand and the mouse ran to it. “That was very brave of you. Doesn’t being so far away from her… hurt? And why doesn’t he have a choice? _You_ clearly do.” I thought about it for another minute, recalling the time when Sean was the sole voice of our mutual story. “I’ve been narrated, I wasn’t… _forced_ to do what my narrator said.” _Was I?_

The mouse shook its tiny, adorable head. “It _should_ hurt to be so far apart but it doesn’t. I think…” it sniffled. “I think my thing with Anna…  broke. That can happen but I don’t know what it means. I also don’t know what happens if he chooses to go against her while she’s telling his story. I don’t think he would enjoy it.”

He laughed outside. “You clearly haven’t met a story that has broken with its narrator, yet. I have- I saw it in the first weeks here. I’d rather serve.”

The mouse shook a fist at the microphone defiantly. “You found a way to get rid of the Concept! You found something out here that might get rid of it, but you started gathering it up to destroy! You could have _saved_ her!”

He looked alarmed at that. “And I might _have_ , you idiot, but now you’ve put it out there in a moment when she’s probably _narrating_ I-” then he shut up. It was like a veil fell over him. One second he was animated, the next- rigidly mechanical. “You two.” He indicated the captain and our driver in front of him. “If I die, kill yourselves.” He turned to the final woman, one of Roy’s troops whose name I couldn’t recall, to my shame. “Now. You, on the left, woman with the red hair. Kill yourself immediately.” I cried out over the intercom but it was too late. She pulled out her own combat knife and plunged it into her throat, severing the jugular. Blood arced again in counterpoint to the slave’s death at the start of this misadventure, and she collapsed onto the sand.

“ _God DAMN it,”_ I shouted, and jumped from the driver’s seat, booting his daemon in the head as hard as I could. I surmised he wasn’t in complete control right now but I couldn’t afford to be gentle. If it killed her, it killed her, but I was hoping- his eyes rolled up and he winked out like a light, dropping unconscious to the dusty road. The other two milled for a second before deciding this _probably_ triggered their suicide instructions and raising their weapons. Rubber bullets and beanbags or not, they’d still kill at point-blank range. Their hesitation had given me time to race to the door of the APC and unlock it. Now I kicked it open and launched myself at Roy.

It wasn’t smooth, or calculated. I’d put my points in the wrong spots for this- I had minimal unarmed skill and not a whole lot of strength. I had no weapons and little training. But they had been thoroughly zombified and their reaction times sucked. Plus I was moving faster than normal, desperate not to let them die, not to turn this into a bloodbath. _Especially_ if he had a way to save them that he couldn’t share. Still, I took hits. 

As I knocked Roy to the ground, the rubber bullets from the driver broke skin and nicked bone. I decked him in the head, hard enough for his helmet to contact the ground and his head to bounce inside it, knocking him out and breaking two of my fingers. Then I pivoted on my hip, sweeping the legs out from under the man right next to him. I grabbed the riot shotgun with beanbag rounds out of his grasp and deflected a shot off his helmet, as he hit me again with more penetrating shots. The force of it threw him around in a way that didn’t look healthy but left him breathing. Struggling up from my tackle, I raised the shotgun, ready to club either of them back down if I had to. Neither was moving.

It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds but I’d been shot four times and broken my hand. _I hate this fucking world._ It all came rushing up on me and I fell against the side of the APC, leaving bloody streaks. _We didn’t drive far enough away from the slavers. I can’t pass out here._ The mall was still in sight, and any of the people I’d just concussed could be up at any moment. “Telantes,” I called. “It’s over. There’s a med kit, in there. Can you bring it?”

He came out in the form of a beautiful silver lynx, carrying the kit in his mouth. Still young enough to shapeshift, then- I remembered that was important in the story. “I’ll take care of myself, you go grab whatever it was that he thought might cure the… Concept infection.”

The lynx looked at me. “Are you going to kill him? You should. He’s too dangerous.”

I was already trying to set my hand. At least I had a lot of points in the Medical skill, so I wasn’t completely useless in the aftermath. “ _OW._ I don’t know. He wasn’t in his right mind, when he killed… god, I really don’t even know her name. What’s wrong with me?” I stopped what I was doing and shuffled on my knees over to the dead woman. Pain and nausea were battling for dominance in me. The sewn patch on her shirt said _Maria_. “When he killed Maria. It sounds like he hasn’t been in his right mind for a few days. When did… Anna, did you say? When did she get captured?” I found the other item I was looking for- an adrenaline injector. I plunged it into my thigh and gasped as I came _wide_ awake. No passing out now, not for an hour or two at least.

The lynx was going through his pockets. “Not long ago. A couple of weeks I guess, we were trapped in a mansion when Merlin found us. Ah! Here they are.” He pulled out a box from Asriel’s jacket, marked _Mentats_ with that cheesy faux-60s branding. “He flashed someone who was addicted to these and the next time they took them, the blue came right off.”

I had other priorities. “Did you say _Merlin_?” I had overheard Asriel mention _Emrys_ which was another name for him, now that I thought about it. “Telantes, who else does the Concept have.” That sick feeling was back in my stomach.

He rattled off a list, sounding very pleased with his good memory. “Lord Asriel, the Panserbjorne, Merlin and King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, a little witch girl, probably others. It got everyone in England, in the end.” _That_ ruined its good mood, and whatever optimism I had begun to accumulate in this scenario. He turned back, resuming field mouse form. “So what will you do?”

I resumed wound dressing. What else could I do? I’d have to tie them all up, tie _him_ up _twice_ , figure out what he was actually doing here and stop it with a localized zombie cure if possible, and then get the hell out. _Then_ all I had to do was stop a likely genie invasion and millions of memetic zombies backed by half the might and minds of all of western literature. And all while some critical piece of me was still _missing_. 

“I don’t know,” I told the little creature honestly. “I really don’t know.”


	37. Chapter 37

\----

Sean, At Hogwarts

Hallow’s Eve

\----

Once I’d made personal contact with my magic, the wards in the castle didn’t seem able to muffle it anymore. Or perhaps the muffling effect was so minor that we no longer noticed it- and it _felt_ like a “We,” like a partnership. I worked with my magic until both of us were at the point of exhaustion every day. I even began attending classes as part of my accelerated education- a turn of events so wild, I was a bit afraid that my reputation would never recover. Within a week I’d asked Dumbledore to move me from the introductory courses- unsurprising, given how much they slow-walked their lessons for young students. I was reasonably confident that I was far beyond second or even third year already.

I could feel the edges of the students’ magic as I worked around them. It was distressing- they had it all wrong! The wands, the words, they were _training_ tools- they drew patterns from the plane that magic seemed to operate on. Demonstrate them a few times and your magic, when unconstrained, would grasp your intent and work _with_ you, jumping through the hoops you laid out for it or even performing the spells without your direct intervention. But Hogwarts and, I assumed, every _other_ wizarding school, trained students to force their magic _through_ the patterns, like a reluctant animal. It was… hugely damaging. The magic adapted eventually, but so much _potential_ was just lost, shaved off forever. The magic of the older students was a sad thing, broken and lifeless. It was a tragedy they couldn’t even see- I resented Hogwarts and Dumbledore a great deal, for arranging it.

In contrast to the extremely conservative lesson plans, I was a wild man. I ignored most of what the instructors taught and blew through the lessons _anyway_ , much to their chagrin and my classmates’ anger. My magic responded instinctively and powerfully, adapting itself to situations in ways that nobody else’s could. And it was showing me _new_ spells, as well. In second year Charms when we were instructed to cast _Aguamenti_ , the kids were barely getting sprinkler-like emanations out of their wands when I dipped mine and accidentally let out a stream so powerful it blew the door open.They asked me how I’d done it, and my magic helpfully recreated the pattern it had assumed, allowing me to trace  it- and it was _reproducible_. The pattern that worked for me could be taught! None of the others managed as much force, but they were getting substantially more than they should have by the time Flitwick called a halt and tried to have a serious talk with me about “The dangers of unlicensed magical improvisation” afterwards. Of _course_ that was a regulated thing.

Draco tried to challenge me to duels through proxies on two separate occasions. I knew it was him- why else would random Slytherins come up during lunch and begin dropping unsubtle hints about my parentage? But I wasn’t in the habit of beating up children, even if I _did_ want to test some of the things my magic was coming up with- something new every day, it seemed. I told them to cram it or held them upside down by their ankles for a few moments and that was the end of it. If he wanted a fight he was going to have to pick it himself.

A second month passed before I knew it, and then it was Halloween. I had less use for Snape’s drugs now, but I had arranged a final get-together between him and Harry as part of the troll escapades that I knew _should_ be coming. That was the end of my participation, as far as I was concerned- the whole thing really bothered me, even if I knew Harry was behaving nothing like an actual eleven year old and we were all ultimately dancing on the narrative strings of a horny teenage girl. I’d informed Severus in general terms that there would be a disruption, and that he would have some time as the classes were ordered back to their dorms to find Harry and take him aside. _I_ , meanwhile, would intercept the troll and help Hermione out. This seemed somewhat disruptive of the trio’s bonding and the original narrative but I figured they’d find the time elsewhere. We awoke in Hufflepuff hall that morning to the smell of baking pumpkins and I smiled- _for once, everything’s going according to plan,_ I thought.

Even if I wouldn’t let the narrator do it, I really knew how to screw _myself_.

It didn’t take long before things began to go off the rails. I was still lounging about the common room, blowing off classes to read one of the few books on transfiguration that _didn’t_ make me want to hurl it across the room, when there was a tremendous racket at the doors. The paintings informed me that it was a young Gryffindor girl in some distress- they gave me quite stern glares, even after I protested my innocence. It was Hermione, of course. After the disastrous charms class where Ron’s insults _should_ have sent her to the second floor girl’s bathroom for most of the rest of the day, to sulk until her fateful encounter with the troll, she’d come to me instead. _Story: altered._

“What do you need?” I asked, with a sick twisting beginning in my gut.

“I need you to _teach_ me.” she said, tears of frustration and anger in her eyes. “You use magic better than anyone else in first year, and you completely ignore the teachers. They say you’re the next Dumbledore. You’re better than _me!_ You know something they don’t, or you’re taking some _potion,_ or- or whatever. I don’t care if you’re breaking the rules, I want in.”

Now, there was an easy remedy for this. If I just blew her off she’d probably go right back to her original pattern. But… she was a child in distress and she wanted to _learn_. Her request cut right to the heart of who I _was_ , the _real_ me, not Sean Peakes the first year Hogwarts student. I found myself struck with uncertainty. I shook my head, laughing at myself. _We’ll fix it later. Tell her what you can._ “Ah, well, I’ve never been much of a teacher but I’ve always wanted to be a wizened old wizard dispensing secrets. You might as well come in.” I opened the door and let her inside. She marvelled at the greenery of the Hufflepuff common room- I supposed the kids really didn’t get to see the others very often. _The whole system’s designed to give them artificial tribes_ , _separate them and set them against each other early_. _Is it just British-ness or is there something more going on, even there?_ “It’s not much of a secret, to be honest. I have one advantage you can’t replicate, but you’ll get there in time.” _I’m just straight-up older._ “For the other- it just involves a… different way of using magic.”

She sat in one of the big arm chairs and whipped out a parchment and quill. _Where was she even keeping those?_ “Tell me everything.”

I sighed and settled into a chair across from her. I was about to drop into a lecture, and then I thought better of it. “Ah, well- Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t know if it’s something I can _tell_. Let me address it plainly. Your magic is alive, it’s a _part_ of you, and Hogwarts is teaching you, incorrectly in my opinion, to _force_ it to cast spells, instead of _training_ it as you would another creature.” She frowned at this, puzzled. “It’s going to be harder to teach you in here, because there’s a ward on the castle that keeps you from feeling it. But- well, maybe a demonstration.” I pulled out her wand and had her perform the spell from that day’s charms class- _Wingardium Leviosa_. She did it perfectly of course, forcing her magic through the forms with mechanical precision that made me wince, but her quill _did_ float quite handily at the end. “Now, try it again, but this time wave your wand and say the words, but that little _push_ you do, in your mind, when you make your magic run through the forms… do you know what I’m talking about?” She nodded eagerly. “Don’t do that part.”

She looked at me curiously but did as instructed. Nothing happened, of course. I could _see_ her magic in my mind’s eye- it saw the spell coming and flinched away, already anticipating the harm that might be inflicted on it. She huffed in frustration. “Nothing.” We went through the exercise several more times, and I had to talk her down from that _push_ by the end.

“It feels like nothing, but your magic is learning that you won’t force it, that you are a willing partner. Your magic is very much an animal, with its own emotional life. It’s just based on _your_ emotions, so you have an advantage in understanding it.” She clearly understood me, but she wasn’t quite _believing_ it. “Here, let me demonstrate.” I cleared my mind and thought of my loved ones, then waved my wand wordlessly through the steps of _Expecto Patronum_. My magic leapt eagerly to the task, and the silver-white light billowed out and took the form of a dragon, sailing around our heads. “Hermione, let me introduce you to my magic.”

She stood in awe, following it around the room. “Oh, it’s beautiful! Can I learn how to do that? I’d love to meet my magic.”

I chuckled. “Well I think it’s something they’re supposed to teach you in _third_ year, and I actually needed a number of drugs that I wouldn’t give a child to tap into mine, but maybe we can get outside the castle in a bit and practice.”

She nodded politely, still absentmindedly following the dragon, and I realized I’d mentioned _drugs_ and really hoped she hadn’t noticed- no such luck, this was _Hermione_ we were talking about. “Wouldn’t give a child?” then something occurred to her. “Wait, so you _did_ have Draco putting something in your food, then? Is it illegal? I don’t really know if I want to cross the law but-”

I cut her off, standing up as I did so. “What.” That sick feeling was back.

She turned back, puzzled. “Draco’s been putting drops of potion in your meals since you both got here, didn’t you know?”

I hadn’t, but suddenly his muttering in the forest made a _lot_ more sense. As well as my inexplicable continued attachment to the little shit, and the strange tentacled beast that had so grievously wounded the emotional core of me, had attacked my love for Haley. _Love potion. He’s been gradually poisoning me with love potion_. “No, I guess I didn’t,” I bit out, trying to constrain the roiling emotions. My magic, flying about the room in _Patronus_ form, screeched and turned nearly feral. I could feel it going out of control and I reached out to stop it, but before I could that connection across dimensions _clicked_ once again and I wasn’t looking at my magic, but at my _wife_.

She fell to the ground without incident and stood back up, the glowing white outline fully human again save for the horns and eyes. She looked _hurt_ , bandages covered her torso and a large and bloody gash ran across her back. She looked around in a panic. “ _Sean send me back I can’t be unconscious send me back right now”_ I stepped towards her hand outstretched, but it was too late- she must have found a way to end the magic from her side, because she winked out and the room was momentarily plunged into darkness.

Hermione looked taken aback- “W- who was _that?_ Do you have another _person_ living in your magic?”

I didn’t even have time to answer her before all hell broke loose. A painted figure ran through the frames to us, panting, as if he’d come at a dead sprint- one from the headmaster’s office, I thought. “Dumbledore- huff- wants to see- huff- _both_ of you, right away.” _Shit, he’s probably going to be peeved if I start subverting the secrets of magic in a more general way._ But we didn’t even make it to the door before a _second_ figure ran up- “AHEM- TROLL IN THE CASTLE. All students return to your dorms and remain there! _”_ I blinked, nonplussed. _It’s barely past noon, isn’t that far too early? Is Quirrel stepping up his time table?_

Regardless, things were going to be afoot. I turned to Hermione. “I’ll answer your questions when this is done but you need to _stay here_. Things may get unsafe.”

She looked indignant. “Well what about _you?_ We’re the _same age!”_ That last was shouted through the closing door of the common room. I pulled my magic tight about me, ready to use an undetectable charm or whatever else I needed to slip through the corridors. I didn’t have the _Marauder’s Map,_ more’s the pity, but my magic _was_ able to tap into the Hogwarts wards to a limited degree and tell me roughly where staff were headed. _Most going to the gauntlet, or shepherding the students, then_. I decided I’d head for the second floor bathrooms- canonically, the Troll had showed up there _somehow_ , perhaps things would get back on the rails enough for it to happen again.

\----

Things didn’t get back on the rails. I stood in the second floor girl’s bathroom, most conspicuously devoid of any trolls, and tried to ignore the bawling of Moaning Myrtle, the resident ghost. I wasn’t picking up _anything_ from this wing of the castle on the wards- I had no idea where the damn thing could be. 

As I stood there and pondered, I _should_ have been watching my back- the door _slammed_ open and Quirrel strode into the room, hitting me with a _Petrificus Totalus_ so lightning fast that I didn’t have time to react. _Voldemort, of course_. It confirmed one of my suspicions at least, as I fell to the ground paralyzed. His magic was dark and ragged and raged like a rabid beast, but he cast like I did- instinctively, the magic flowing like water to carry out his intent. _But I think his might actually_ fear _him._ I’d not taken Quirrel into consideration at all, but apparently _he_ hadn’t missed _me_.

“Mr. Peakes, was it?” He asked, in his high reedy voice but without any of the stuttering or timidity he reserved for the public. _Guess he plans to kill me._ “My master thinks you may be a threat. He _thought_ a precocious young thing like yourself might go seeking the Chamber of Secrets during this time of upheaval, and here you are, on the very threshold! Why don’t we carry you across?” Even as he spoke I heard a _second_ voice, undoubtedly that of Voldemort’s creepy baby-face underneath his turban, speaking in Parseltongue. The sinks of the bathroom slid away, revealing the passage to the chamber, _far_ too early for the narrative. I’d genuinely forgotten that this was the same bathroom- you’d think someone would have noticed after the troll wrecked things in the original timeline, but that was wizards for you. _He definitely plans to kill me._

Applying all my magic, I could barely loosen the magical bindings holding me tightly. I used my freedom to speak- “The… troll…”

Quirrel snorted contemptuously as he levitated my entire body and began carrying me before him like a sack of grain. “A distraction- _originally_ planned as a play for the Sorcerer’s Stone, but now? It will do quite nicely to keep them all occupied while my Master makes a leap to a _new_ host. _He_ thinks you’ll be more powerful- he suspects you might even be _Harry Potter_ himself, and the half-wit playing footsie with Snape an unwitting dupe. A masterful play by Dumbledore, to be sure.” _Oh shit, he wants to ride me like a rented mule_. _Harriet, I dislike the way your mind works._ I honestly didn’t have the first clue what that would do. I assumed I’d reject any overt control, but- this had a feeling of “Just desserts” to it, as well. _Not even Hufflepuffs can fly as high as I was without drawing attention-_ especially _not Hufflepuffs, you idiot_.

We made our way down the dank stone passage to the sewer-vault or… _whatever_ it was that the chamber was supposed to be. Again that sibilant hissing came out, and I heard the rumble of the great basilisk moving away, in the distance. I dearly wished I _had_ thought of a way down here- to gain Slytherin’s secrets would have been an enormous coup. As it was, I’d be lucky to get out alive. I tried to gasp out an objection. “Voldemort… _know things_ … can’t… take my mind…”

Quirrel brought me close and cuffed me. I still had the body of a small child- the blow set my ears ringing. “ _You will not speak his name._ My master will take what he _wants_ , fool child. You merely confirm his suspicions. Now hold still while I prepare the ritual.” He left me bound and hovering as he strode off, no doubt going to fetch whatever ingredients he was about to need for a mind-transferrence ritual.

The second he was out of sight my magic was joined in worrying at my bonds by someone _else’s_. I fell to the ground, still partially bound but no longer levitating. Whoever it was couldn’t seem to cancel the _Petrificus_ but I had enough freedom of movement to wriggle like an inch worm towards the source of my salvation- a cluster of rocks near the entrance. I leapt at the opportunity- well, more realistically, I shoved my face across the jagged, rocky ground at the opportunity. A tremendous amount of exertion and a good number of cuts and scrapes later, I made it behind the rocks, only to find Draco. I sighed internally.

His eyes were wild with fear and alarm. The part of me that didn’t understand it was _fucking poisoned_ was touched, before I realized he’d probably been stalking me all morning if he’d managed to follow me down here. “Peakes! What is Quirrel up to? Why did he bind you, and what is- _this_ place?”

At least my mouth was fully recovered, if not the rest of me. I lay on the floor and glared up at him. “Thank you for the rescue, and _fuck you_ for everything else, you little asshole. Quirrel is playing Body Snatchers with Voldemort and this is the Chamber of Secrets. Help me out of these bindings and let’s get out of here.”

He gave a start and an evil look came into his eye. “You know, I’ve just realized, you’re talking awfully tough for a bloke who’s pretty much paralyzed. Why, it seems-” his hands began to wander down to my robe- “I could do pretty much anything. I. Wanted to.” With each pause he leaned a little closer until our lips were nearly touching.

“ _God damn it this is life or death, and I’m not interested in little boys, you idiot! What’s it going to take to get that through to you?”_ I hissed in my loudest, quietest voice ever. I could hear Quirrel coming back from the other end of the chamber.

He just grinned at me. “You’re not, eh? Prove it.” And then his lips locked with mine. I _think_ it was supposed to be a moment of sublime romance, where I finally realized something about my true nature and so on. It wasn’t. It was scary molestation by a shitty little sociopath in a dungeon with very certain death lurking just on the other side of a rock, and I was fucking _done_ with this narrative. Something in me went _click_ , and my magic ripped through the bindings and flung Draco away just as Quirrel gave a shout of fear and anger- no doubt discovering that I’d left my hiding place.

Draco screamed as he was flung, _hard_ , against the wall near the door. I practically levitated upright. “Harriet, _no_. This is practically _rape_ and I have _had it with this story_. You haven’t got the first idea how romance works. Children _cannot consent_ , they aren’t mature or developed enough, and everything about this- me and Draco, Snape and Harry- is _severely_ fucked up. It might seem like a harmless laugh from the outside but you try fucking _living in it._ I’m done. I’m done and I’m out.” Draco just looked at me, bewildered- I suppose from his perspective I’d lost my mind. But then something happened.

Even as Quirrel’s masked rider ordered him to “Pursue and kill them before they reveal you” or something to that effect, I really wasn’t listening anymore, Draco spoke- and it _wasn’t his voice._ “You’re _ruining everything._ You and Draco are star-crossed! It’s so perfect! Why can’t you just let it happen? How are you even arguing with me? You’re _my character_!” He said in the tones of an angry young woman. It was _Harriet_ , speaking to me directly. He looked absolutely horrified and clapped his hands over his mouth, and I was so stunned I almost missed the _third_ awful thing to happen in as many seconds. When she spoke- the very instant she intervened directly- the world _lurched_ , and I felt it. In some dimension I was privvy to, it was like an earthquake was happening. _I think it really may be coming apart_.

I grabbed him by the robe and my magic levitated him until I could haul him off his feet and up the stairs, with Quirrel now in hot pursuit- only the steep curve of that staircase kept him from blasting us in the first seconds. I transfigured the surface of several steps to ice as we raced upwards, and heard a crash and cursing below that told me that at least one of my traps had paid off in a little more lead time. As I ran I continued my argument. “Harriet from my perspective everyone here is a _real person_. Harry is a little kid who’s spent his life being abused in a _closet_. He’s been free for less than two months and you think he’s ready to fall in love? I’m _a hundred and thirty years old,_ and _happily married._ You are trying to get me to romance an eleven year old _poisoner_ who thought my total paralysis was the perfect time to cop a feel. You can’t force this on me and I will break your story if you try.”

We burst out of the bathroom. Snape and Harry were standing alone in the hallway over the corpse of the troll, locked in a passionate kiss. Draco, still flailing and looking around wildly, spoke in that smug, totally disconnected voice. “Oh yeah? _Break that_.” The story lurched again, jarred heavily in some other dimension, and I didn’t even slow my roll.

I flung Draco’s nearly-massless body so that it floated helplessly around the corridor, then turned and pressed myself behind the nearest statue, calling out to them. “Heads up, jailbait! Voldemort’s walking out of that door in about two-” and then he was on us. The door blew off its hinges and nearly levelled Snape, throwing him off balance. Quirrel flew into the hallway in a snarl of robes and flashing magic, levelling a green bolt of murderous intent at his fellow professor. _Careful who you’re assuming is the bigger threat there, Voldemort._ I threw my magic into an instinctive _Protego_ that took the hit near-effortlessly and then began returning fire with stunners that manifested from mid-air at a machine gun pace- the misses showering him with brick dust and the hits forcing him to throw up shields. Snape, no slouch himself, recovered his wits and shoved Harry behind him, lashing out at Quirrel with something that looked a _lot_ like napalm.

Quirrel was still juiced by Voldemort though, and he wasn’t going to be a pushover. He spoke some word of power that made the hallway shudder and the flames were blown back at us, along with my stun bolts. We dove in different directions and came up ready to fight again. I yelled at Snape as we did so. “Severus, you asshole- you were supposed to _talk_ to him! If you think I’m not telling Dumbledore about this-”

Snape shouted back from the other side of the fray- “We were _just talking_! And then the troll showed up, and I- I-” _Yes, I have a pretty good idea how it went down. Harriet notwithstanding, you’re still an asshole. You could have said no._

I deflected another death bolt- they _really_ weren’t that hard to stop when you saw them coming, I didn’t understand why the wizarding world was so scared of them- and said very seriously “Look, you’ve had a messed up life, I get it. But you can’t take that out on your students. You love him? You can _wait_ for him. What’s the age of consent around here, 16? Good god man, have some self respect! What would Lily think?”

He seemed chagrined as he threw something that seemed to quintuple the gravity in the local region around Quirrel- I took note of _that_ pattern for later use. “I… you’re right. I feel like my judgement’s been clouded. This isn’t me.”

The scream that came from Quirrel then was so loud that it drove us both to our knees. My magic recoiled and tried to block it but it was useless. I couldn’t tell if it was _him_ , or Voldemort, or _Harriet_ , or some combination of the three. “ _NO! STOP IGNORING ME! YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING!”_ In a flash, he turned and fired another _Avada Kedavra_ at Snape and this time, neither he _nor_ I was in a position to block it.

But _someone_ was. _“NO!”_ shouted Harry, and threw himself between the shot and Snape. _That’s not supposed to happen until seventh year-_ was all I had time to think before their magics made contact. The resonance between Harry and Voldemort, the interaction of the protections bestowed by his mother and Voldemort’s killing spell, was too much. Quirrel’s head _erupted_ like a Roman candle, all of Voldemort’s magic detonating at once and spraying my side of the hallway with gore. Harry absorbed the shot and was blasted backwards, bowling over Snape.

If that had been the end of it, it would have been tragic, but salvageable. I stood shakily, casting around for Draco, who was cowering at the far end of the corridor. Snape knelt in the hallway, cradling the Boy Who Lived No More, the smoking hole in his chest testament to _that_. But then he spoke the words that we would _all_ come to regret, in later days. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” He turned his head skywards, overwhelmed with anguish. “IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS! _I die, he lives!_ This isn’t how it _goes!_ ”

And just like that, the narrative, already strained to the breaking point… simply _broke_. I heard her, from down the hall, speaking through Draco one final time. “Then I guess you can figure out how it goes on your _own,_ because _I quit!_ Honestly, characters writing themselves, who ever-” she gradually faded out, muttering angrily to herself.

And _as_ she faded out, the world… _drained_. Life. Light. _Purpose_. I saw it leaving the eyes of Snape and Draco. It felt like _color_ was leaching from the walls, leaving them greyer than they’d been before, though they were exactly as vibrant as they’d been before. I stood, paralyzed for a moment, until I realized that the others had stopped moving altogether. They no longer blinked. They no longer _breathed_. Snape held the body of his… of _Harry_ , and Draco hunched in on himself down the corridor, but they were statues now. The world was a freeze-frame. _This is what happens. Randall Flagg warned me, about things beyond the stories. We’d wondered what happens when an author and a narrative can’t reconcile. I think… I’m finding out. What happens to stories without their narrators._

I ran, then. Fleeing aimlessly. I could still feel my magic around me, but- I couldn’t feel anyone _else_. The whole of the castle, of the _planet_ , was likely as lifeless as the little tableaux I passed while running. I found other students still hurrying to their dorms, all stuck in mid pose. Teachers with wands out, on guard against any further attacks to their charges. _They couldn’t guard against this_ , I thought. I found Dumbledore and a trio of other wizards in serious-looking black suits, hurrying down the steps from the floor where he kept his office, no doubt rushing to the Chamber to see what the disturbance was. _Always one step too late aren’t you, Dumbledore._ I didn’t begrudge him that. This time it was _my_ negligence that had caused the disaster. _Just like-_ my mind shied away from that topic, the moment on the hill when I’d lost my best hope of sticking by Haley’s side. This was looking like it might be a repeat. But what was I supposed to do? Romance a little boy? Let Snape molest an abused child? _Walk away, you idiot. You were supposed to make a cameo, get what you needed, and walk away._ I couldn’t stop blaming myself.

My run slowed to a walk, and then a shuffle, as I realized where I was going. The Hufflepuff common room. The portrait hung open, but I dreaded what I would see inside. _Hermione_. Stuck among a crowd of other students she still stood out- books spread in front of her on one of the study tables. She was still trying for a forceless _Wingardium Leviosa_ , by the looks of it. And there, on the tip of her wand, almost impossible to see in the gradual dimming of both color and light- the faintest glimmer of a spark. My first student, lost in the moment of her first breakthrough.

 _It can’t end like this_. _It can’t_. I’d tie myself to the story here, if I had to, to breathe life back into these characters. If only I knew _how_. “Please,” I said, speaking into the gathering gloom. “Please, someone, take up this story. I can’t have killed a whole world.” I fell to my knees. “Please. I’m sorry. I’ll… I can play along. If I have to, if this is the alternative.” There was no response. I didn’t even know how to leave, it occurred to me- I supposed I could just step back through the void. Or maybe the void would come here, now. The world continued to dim, light fading until darkness claimed me. “Please.”

“Sean?” I realized I had closed my eyes at some point. _That’s Hermione’s voice_. I sat up. The room was… _animate_ again! What, who? She was looking at me with concern. “When did you get here? You’re covered in- _is that blood?_ ” She shrieked and jumped up, startling the others in the room. I just grinned- they were _alive_.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “Whoever you are- thank you.” It wasn’t Harriet. Something _felt_ different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

And down in Hogsmeade, at the train stop that only saw activity six times a year, an engine made an unscheduled stop. A single passenger disembarked. She’d been a bit delayed, this year, but had finally managed to make the journey. “At last,” she said, and smiled like a kid at Christmas.

  
It was the strangest thing, though- everyone who saw her could _swear_ that her eyes were glowing, faintly blue.


	38. Chapter 38

\----

Haley, Capital Wasteland

Present Day

\----

Artificial adrenaline was still coursing through my veins, causing my ears to ring and my heart to hammer, when I finished hog-tying the two zombies and the Brytish lord, along with his cat. With him _thoroughly_ searched for any further tricks and the others secured in such a way that they couldn’t get at each other’s bindings, I sat and tried to ignore the tiny shapeshifter running around my feet keeping up a frantic stream of commentary.

“So what are we going to do? I’m so glad you came along I really thought I wouldn’t find anyone! Do you think the pills will cure all of them? He got them from a place called a Vault do you think we should go there? They might have more! Are you going to be okay? They shot you an awful lot out there, that was crazy! What are we going to _do?_ ” The hyper little mouse-parakeet-ferret-cat scampered around like it hadn’t tasted freedom in _days,_ which, to be fair, it probably hadn’t. But it was wearing on my patience and making it hard to think.

Finally as it ran across my shoulders I snapped, “ _I DON’T KNOW!”_ and immediately felt terrible as the little daemon recoiled and ran to a corner. “I don’t _know_ , Telantes. There’s too much going on and too much at stake.” None of this felt right- I just couldn’t get into it, there was something missing in my mind and I couldn’t help but prod at it like a sore tooth. I considered my unconscious charges. This would be so much _easier_ if I didn’t care about two of the three of them. Lord Asriel I could take or leave, but even a child-murdering sociopath might prove useful. “I can’t leave his operations here undisturbed, but there’s an _invasion_ going on in my world- _two_ invasions, I guess. And I need to get back there, back where my magic works. This world so clearly wants me to shoot my way out. I refuse.”

I turned back to the zombies, who were gradually coming to. They didn’t moan or try to bite- they weren’t _physically_ infectious, and I imagined whatever version of the meme had gripped them mostly made them extremely receptive to instruction by Asriel. They simply sat in the back, completely ignoring their injuries and staring at me with a blue-eyed intensity that unsettled me. I sighed, and looked at the case we’d pulled from Asriel’s coat. “Mentats” it said, in big friendly letters, “Courtesy Vault 101. Praise the Overseer!” Whatever _that_ meant. “I guess we’ll try one of these. Roy, you’re the most responsible for getting our people captured. You’re my guinea pig.” He didn’t resist or bite at me when I approached- just kept staring, wriggling slightly behind his back at the bonds. He’d wear through his arms before he wore through the nylon rope, and I realized as I thought it that that was a _legitimate_ concern- I didn’t think he’d stop once he began to bleed. Whatever- I forced his jaw open with one hand and crammed a tab of the stuff down his throat, then massaged until he swallowed on reflex. _Giving all those pills to mom’s old dog when I was young finally comes in handy._

It took very little time before it took effect. His eyes didn’t _clear_ but the glow muted, a little. He shook his head and his eyes began to scan again, show signs of interest in things _other_ than my immediate death. “Ugh- I have the world’s _worst_ hangover. Haley?” He looked blearily at me. “I think… you were right. This… _clearly_ isn’t our world.”

I smiled weakly, happy just to see him come back. _They can be saved! I honestly wasn’t sure if my magic would do it, I’m glad there’s an alternative._ “Can you describe what you’re feeling?”

He shook his head. “I _can_ but I don’t know if you want to hear it. It’s like my brain’s full of big, blue spiders. It’s all that half of me can focus on. Before, it was _all_ of me. But it’s like… these pills expanded my mind somehow, and it’s a space the spiders can’t occupy. I’ve got room to think, to resist. But I can still feel them in there, trying to manipulate me.”

My grin vanished as quickly as it had come. “That sounds... “ I checked the tin in my inventory screen. 5 intelligence, 5 perception, 2 hours. “Extremely temporary.” He looked crestfallen and I tried to cheer him up. “Listen, once I’ve had a 2 hour rest out in the real world, I’ll have my spells back and I can get an angel to throw a _Heal_ on you. There are other options.” _And I really hope they work_. _This thing spreads via in-universe memes, I have suspicions about permanent cures. But we’ll see_. “In the meantime… I think we need to visit this Vault.”

Telantes piped up. “Yeah! It’s like his home base now, we’ve got to shut it down.” I untied Roy, cautiously, until I was sure he wasn’t going to leap at us. The pills in that case would keep him functional for a day or so if he consumed them all. Hopefully, the Vault would have a substantially larger supply- as the one thing that I _knew_ worked, I wanted as much of it on hand as possible for future situations.

He stopped me as I went back to the driver’s seat. “Listen, I… remember. I remember you risking your life and everything you did to save us. I remember _shooting_ you. I’m sorry I doubted you before. You- you could have killed us, easily. I can’t even say you’d have been wrong to do so.”

It was good to hear the words, but the weight on my heart didn’t ease much. I shook my head at him. “Never easily. In the end it was good we came in here- we learned of a threat that might have taken us by surprise otherwise. We... lost Maria, out there, because we weren’t working together. Let’s get back without losing the others.” He bobbed his head in agreement and went about policing the weapons.

As he worked, he said “Just promise me one thing. If I start to turn back, if these pills start wearing off- _kill me,_ please. Don’t let me spend the rest of my life like that. Alive and conscious and not able to think of anything except that _idea_. It’s a nightmare.”

I stared out the front window and struck the armored carrier into gear. I really hoped we had enough fuel to truck out to wherever this vault turned out to be. We’d brought extra, on this trip, but we’d already driven for five or six hours. “I promise I’ll do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. But I’m not going to kill you, Roy. I’m not killing _anyone_. Telantes, tell me everything you can about the vault. In particular, tell me where I need to start driving.”

\----

Where it was located, as it turned out, was almost directly south of us through an overnight drive. Telantes relayed the story of the last few days as I carefully navigated the bombed-out cityscape of the capital wasteland, ignoring about a hundred calls to adventure carefully staged in my path. The game world _clearly_ wanted me to engage, so very badly, but I was determined to head straight towards what was sounding more and more like the very final boss.

Asriel had settled into the wasteland several days ago and his first move had been to expose the Concept to the recently opened Vault 101. More of an underground village designed for long-term civilization than a proper fallout shelter, it had apparently not had any sort of defenses against surface attack- it had fallen within hours, and he’d sent search parties out to subdue surface worlders and return with interesting technology samples. The Fallout universe was pretty uniformly lethal and most of them didn’t make it back- not that Asriel cared overmuch. Unfortunately one of the parties that did return had encountered the Brotherhood of Steel, some sort of technology-fetishizing holdover from the nuclear war that devastated this world, and recovered several examples of their extremely advanced power armored suits. He’d wanted to gather _more_ but the Brotherhood were smart enough that they began countering the standard Concept tactics of bum-rush and memetic spam pretty quickly. He would have won a war of attrition but he had some kind of schedule to keep, so he’d made his way out into the devastation to find un _-_ zombified help, and had run into _me,_ instead. I looked to him for confirmation of any of this- I couldn’t risk ungagging him for fear of any further orders to the remaining zombie, who was still working himself bloody on the ropes. He glared back without any indication what he was thinking.

It sounded a lot like my challenge was going to be to find a way to assault or infiltrate an entire subterranean city populated by memetically hazardous zombies, some of whom were wearing fusion-powered armored suits. This felt _distinctly_ like the world of Fallout thumbing its nose at me and my notions of pacifism. _I’m not giving up yet, damn it_. I put my mind to work on the problem as I drove.

We passed burnt-out office buildings and a caravan of wasteland salespeople. We drove over a rotten, ancient concrete bridge and I was astonished when it didn’t crack and plunge us into the irradiated water. We ignored open caverns and animal dens and on one occasion, parked between two rocks to hide from an overhead patrol by some kind of twin-engined VTOL craft that I assumed was related to the stirred-up Brotherhood. Nothing I wanted to pit the armor of my APC against, that was for sure. We drove through the night and into early dawn and eventually we arrived- Telantes indicated to me that the hill we were looking at was just a few miles from the hiding place of Vault 101, and I parked us far enough away that we wouldn’t immediately alert the guards that I _assumed_ were posted at the entrance. Asriel very helpfully glared at me some more when I asked.

I climbed off the driver’s seat and went back to sit next to him. Time for a confrontation I should have had earlier. “Asriel- I’m not going to call you _Lord_ anything, if I can help it- I’d like to be totally honest with you. I have about two dozen competing incentives to kill you right here, and _very little_ that is keeping you alive aside from an acute case of conscience. I have a feeling that, story and setting-wise, the second I turn my back on you you’re going to get out of here, probably hurt or kill Roy to establish motivation for me, and you’re going to try to ambush me or otherwise try to kill me while I’m going about my business and I’ve had just about _enough_ of pompous assholes who think they can come down on me hard enough to change my course.” He seemed a little nonplussed by this, but otherwise didn’t react. His leopard was growling at me, low and menacing.

I stood up and smiled sweetly at him. “I need to shut down your operation here and it’s going to be a risky mission. So I can’t leave you behind me. Do you understand? This world _wants_ me to kill you, and I am very capable of it.” I reached down to the cat, and she began to kick and thrash. I brushed the area where she was still missing an ear and they _both_ shuddered. “But I don’t _want_ to,” I said, contemplative. “I’ve killed before but… it was an unthinking mistake. I had so much power that it became as easy as swatting a fly, and- I’m stronger now, in some ways. I have to correct for it. I like to think that I’m the kind of person who does that, who can change even when it’s impossible to repent. I don’t want to be a killer when it’s convenient.” I considered him for a long moment, and then deftly undid the knot on the ties holding his cat. She sprang away to his side, hissing angrily at me. He looked at me in surprise. “So I’m not going to be. I have the right to make that judgement.”

He shook his head at me even as I pulled out his gag. “What are you doing, you fool woman? You’ve seen it- I’m not in full control of myself, I could become a danger at any time.”

Roy, who was watching all this out of the corner of his eye from the other side of the passenger compartment, chimed in. “Yeah, I mean- I don’t want us shooting him either, but- you can’t _know_ he’s going to escape.”

I glanced between both of them. “I’m the only one here who seems to fully grasp the reality that we’re operating on now. Story-wise, he is _guaranteed_ to become an issue here, because the story wants us in conflict. So I’m making it a moment of character growth. Subverting the narrative.” I turned back to focus on Asriel exclusively. “You _are_ in full control of yourself. Telantes is in full control of _him_ self, and he has even closer ties to your narrator.” He grimaced at that, trying to deny the point. “No- don’t look away. What you’re doing, you’re doing out of _fear_. Fear of what, I’m not sure. Reading your stories, I never took you for a coward-” _that_ got his attention, “But you clearly have the ability to resist the direction of her story. Whether you choose to use it or not- well.”

I went to the side hatch and opened it. “Get out, start walking. In the _opposite_ direction of the vault. If she overrides you, resist. If she breaks your story anyway- well, I’ve adopted a character from another story _before_ , I can do it again. It’s time for you to be better than this, Asriel. If I see you in that vault now, it’s because you’ve failed a moral test, and even if _I_ don’t kill you, by narrative law you’re more-or-less doomed. You understand that?”

He stood, hands still tied behind him. “You’re absolutely mad.” But he saw the look in my eyes and realized I was serious. For the first time since I’d met him, he _really_ looked me. “But I’ve known some madwomen in my day, and they were always the most effective sort.” Under his breath, he muttered “Emrys was _right_ to fear you, ‘Dragon Wife.’” People kept _calling_ me that- was it a reference to our original story? Did he _know_ my original story?

He straightened his back, as much as any of us could in this cramped space, and gave me what I wanted- “You and I want the same thing, I think- to be rid of this story.” He jerked and shuddered, clearly feeling a _pull_ not to finish his statement. “ _No_ \- I will say what I mean to say. I will leave this wasteland, and not oppose you further here. I can’t promise we will never be enemies. But if you _can_ remove the Concept from their minds-” he _jerked_ again, and whatever was pulling on him gripped him so tautly that I _felt_ it, even within my own narrative.

 _Come on, you bastard, fight it_ , I thought, watching his struggle. _You built an army to overthrow heaven. You threw Metatron into the abyss, once. You can weather this._ He didn’t say much more, but he didn’t fall into that blank-faced trance he had taken before, either. _I think she’s not ready to drop the one trump she has- you have more leeway to resist her than you thought._ He said only one word. “Silvertongue.” _His daughter? Or a compliment?_ He nodded, once, and then left. His cat lingered in the door for a moment and then spoke to me for the first time I could recall. “Free us, please.” Then she disappeared into the wasteland evening. Roy blew out a long breath. “I really hope you know what you’re doing because that _looked_ an awful lot like giving them warning that you’re on the way.”

I began to prepare, but acknowledged that he wasn’t wrong. “We’re all making it up as we go along. It was that or shoot him, here and now, and if the only two options are trusting that someone can make a choice to be _better_ , or killing them in cold blood- I’ll at least try the first option, every time. And it’ll still take him an hour to get there, from here.”

I armed myself as well as I could. Lucky for me there was no crafting mechanic in this game, which gave me a lot of leeway to just make things up as I went along, not being constrained to what I found laying around in two hundred year old dumpsters. I dumped quite a few points into Science, which governed hacking but also told me enough about the weird bizarro-world technology of Fallout that I was able to craft a crude EMP with the remaining taser batteries and some odds and ends lying about the cabin. Enough to begin the rudimentary plan that was forming in the back of my mind. “Alright. Roy, please keep a lookout and take care of our teammate here. Leave the emergency radio on and tuned to our frequency. It’s time go do something _really_ stupid.”

I left the APC in a crouch, keeping my “Stealth” activated. When I finally rounded the corner of the hill and came on the cave that held the vault as guided by Telantes, still in my pocket, I saw to my dismay that the zombies weren’t quite as disorganized as I’d hoped. There were _two_ suits of truly intimidating looking powered armor standing in front of the giant mechanical cog that formed the vault door, both with some variant of a giant sci-fi laser rifle that I wasn’t about to tangle with. Their eyes glowed blue in the depths of their burnished-steel stormtrooper helmets. “One I can deal with,” I muttered, “but two? I’m going to need a distraction.”

Telantes sprang out of his hiding place. “Oh! I can do that, one second.” Before I could grab for him he was gone, off among the rocks. Soon enough I heard him calling out in his all-too-human voice, from some hiding place on the far side. “Oi you! You great big metal tools! Yeah, I’m talking to you! Come do your guard thing at me!” It was effective, at least- both of the armored zombies began to lumber out of their positions and toward the source of the noise. I could only assume he’d be fine- he was so small and capable of changing into almost anything, they’d never find him before I was done with them.

I got behind the rearmost one. If there was one stupid trick I knew about Fallout and these open-world RPG’s in general, it was the one I was going to try now. _Come on game, let me see-_ Aha! The ability to “Pickpocket” seemed to flash into place in my mind- I could transfer items between his inventory and mine. Unfortunately I couldn’t take his worn items, so no stealing the suit off his back, but I armed the EMP grenade and slipped it into his… uh, where exactly had I put that? No matter, it wasn’t in my hands anymore. I slipped back several feet and waited. Within seconds there was a crackling _pulse_ and the zombie’s armor seized, before toppling over. _One down_ , I thought.

Now that he was prone and helpless, I could get at his worn inventory. It was nice not to have to physically strip the armor off of his unconscious body because I had _no idea_ how I’d have done that. Instead I just nicked it out of some conceptual space and it disappeared from him, and onto _me_. It seemed to reboot on its own, which was also extremely convenient. I could get used to getting dressed in video games. It also elevated my strength slightly, which helped me to drag the unconscious man behind a nearby outcropping to conceal the body. I didn’t really care about the protection it afforded me in the physical sense- I was more concerned about the camouflage. The zombie ahead finally gave up his search for Telantes, who I _really_ hoped would get back out to the APC, and turned back towards me. I stood stock-still, now dressed in the suit of his fellow zombie- _crap, I forgot the gun, will he notice?_

He didn’t. Whatever instructions they were operating on, “Watch for outsiders” was clearly number one. Asriel wasn’t conversant with video games so I was really hoping that idiot shenanigans like crouching to turn nearly invisible and wearing a full-body suit to _appear_ friendly had not occurred to him. We returned to “Our” guard posts, and I noticed in the crook of rock just inside the cave that there was already a body. _Poor bastard._ I glanced at the other guard while I worked the radio inside the suit. He still hadn’t moved and no longer seemed to be paying any attention to me. “Roy, can you hear me? I’ve got one of these tank-suits on. This thing is ridiculous. Over.” I could hear him trying to respond but it was a crackling mess, I got maybe one word in three. Either the radio wasn’t compatible or it didn’t penetrate the mountain, or something was going on with the airwaves.

I began shuffling forward and when the other guard made no move to stop me, turned it into a more normal walk. This damn thing was _awkward._ It was going to be impossible to sneak while wearing it, but… hopefully they’d just ignore me? That didn’t seem like it would work forever. The body had identification and a jump suit from inside the vault- it said “Steve Armstrong” which meant nothing to me. _Poor bastard, I guess you tried to escape when you saw what was going down_. He also had an item on him called a _Stealth Boy_ which sounded like just about the most useful thing _ever_ if you asked me. I took that and turned back. Still no reaction from the other guard. I nodded at him awkwardly and strolled onwards, into the vault.

It was a poor name, I thought, for what spread out before me. Corridor after corridor, brightly lit and trimmed with all the furnishings of home. It felt more like the world’s most advanced dormitory, aside from the truly interesting areas like the indoor parks and fake-outdoor restaurants. Someone had gone to great lengths to build this whole place up into some kind of semi-coherent recreation of the retro-future living conditions of suburban America before the bombs fell. Unfortunately for me, underground suburbia was entirely overrun with zombies, and they were _busy_.

The shops and restaurants were empty aside from a couple of communal feeding troughs, clearly built to provide whatever slop they might shovel into themselves to keep their bodies running for another day. The smell was pretty indescribable and I wondered what the lifespan of these people would be once disease took hold. Flickering screens were stationed on every wall, and crowds of vault-dwellers queued up to take instructions from them- those that weren’t already working in the makeshift sweat-shops, in any case. When I realized what the images on the screens were, I quickly ducked my head down and didn’t raise it above floor-level. The damn meme was everywhere and I had no idea which versions would be infectious to me- probably _all_ of them. I was clearly running on the same operating system, right now.

They seemed to be building something, or several somethings, but I couldn’t say what. One section of the facility was clearly dedicated to _de_ construction- items of valuable technology came in, and a disassembly line was set up to pick them apart and extract useful components. Intriguingly, there were zombies stationed over many of the more useful items drafting something that looked a lot like blueprints- for possible industrial assembly later? For now, most of the parts were being taken further into the facility.

I didn’t see any other armored suits, but after glancing at me the “Civilian” zombies seemed to recognize what I was wearing as friendly and didn’t think about it any further. I wandered through the facility, trying to observe what I could without looking at any flickering screens, and I had _several_ near misses. I got pretty lucky.

Until, eventually, I didn’t. I heard it before I saw it- a kind of metallic screeching, like static or infomorph speech but higher pitched and _much_ more information-dense. Hearing it made my ears ring and my head begin to swim, even echoing at a long distance. I realized that it had to be an aural version of the meme and set my helmet’s filters to block external sound, immediately feeling better. Until I saw what was _making_ it. It was a flying octopus made of metal- it had a spherical central body balanced on a ludicrous exhaust thruster, and three armored tentacles ending in what looked an awful lot like a blowtorch, a circular saw, and a bullhorn. One jointed robotic eye swiveled from the top of the thing as it blared static in all directions. It was, in short, a horrific 1960’s sci-fi robot come to life, and- apparently- now infected by the meme. As it approached packs of zombies it blasted that horrible noise at them, and they turned and- _oh no_. They were answering back with clicks and pops. This was some kind of internal security check and I _couldn’t_ know the code- to know it would be mind-destroying. _Asriel, this feels like something you’d set up._ I began to back away, but the robot noticed and trailed after me. I tried to find an empty area for a confrontation instead- the best I could do was a nearby supply closet, recently emptied of everything but a few boxes of “Washo Detergent.” I closed the door and waited.

It caught up to me, and I sprang into action as soon as the door began to move. I yanked it inside and tried to slam it against the concrete wall. It screeched in mechanical alarm before spinning away from me, astonishingly agile on that single rocket motor, and flailed back with its tentacle limbs. The circular saw did nothing, but the blowtorch left a series of scorches across my armor and set some warning signs flashing within. I had a pistol, packed along from the APC, but I wasn’t about to fire in here and risk alerting the whole station. So I bum-rushed it. I pinned it to the wall with the bulk of my armored suit, and simply clubbed it to death with metal fists. It was… unsettling. It screeched and flailed like a living thing, and scored a couple of decent hits as it slowly crumpled under the assault. But it stopped moving eventually, and I fell back, exhausted. This damn suit was _heavy_.

  
After a while I realized I still couldn’t hear anything from outside, and re-engaged my external audio. That was when I got my _second_ nasty shock. Asriel’s voice was ringing over the vault intercom.


	39. Interlude - Crossing The Threshold Pt. 1

\----

Contact Team 13, Volo Ingenium

Moments after the truce period ends

\----

 _Holy shit holy shit holy shit._ Sergeant Matt Cooper, formerly of the RCMP, now of Contact, sheltered behind the newly grown shield over the portal gateway and screamed to keep his ears from popping. _And I was worried this was going to be one sided._ Around him thunder like he’d never heard before was splitting the air. Flashes of heat and blasts of air were coming so fast that he couldn’t even distinguish which side was doing the firing. Looking up, he saw another bright-red figure in bronze armor swooping down at them, a shimmering heat aura promising instant immolation if it got too close- Charlie’s charred husk was a hundred feet in front of him on the massive branch, a reminder of what would happen. Matt and Nina levelled their weapons and unloaded, emptying their clips and managing only to score the armor and inflict what looked like glancing wounds on the giant. It ignored the hailstorm and kept coming, readying a giant flaming halberd before another _crack_ of thunder sounded and the monster just _came apart_ , punched into a mist by rounds traveling at speeds too fast to register, speeds that Matt didn’t think should be _possible_ in an atmosphere without leaving streaks of fire. Another of Shamutt’s drones buzzed by- this one looked like it was _built_ around a canon- and threw them a thumbs-up with a vestigial limb. Matt smiled weakly and thumbs-up’d back at it before it flew off. “We need some bigger goddamn guns,” said Nina, surveying the carnage. Matt couldn’t help but agree- they weren’t going to last ten more minutes in here. He had Roy’s holdout, still- but that was for a rogue dragon or possibly deity. Did it apply here?

As his team watched, the Extras hadn’t wasted the hour they’d been given. Their whole goddamn _society_ was robots, it seemed, and within minutes they’d had self-assembling artillery and flyers and drones pouring out of just about every hive in a hundred miles. But they hadn’t fired a shot, no- even as the armies of Efreet mustered and the cities spread their ruinous lava, the infomorphs had held deathly silent and still. Matt imagined their radio networks must be alive with chatter, but it had been _damn_ eerie seeing thousands of their drones, _millions_ , taking to every surface and simply staring at the great flaming cities, silently.

At the hour mark the gates of those vast fortresses had opened and a horde of giant warriors had descended- Matt’s jaw dropped when he realized the flight wasn’t mechanically powered. They could just _fly_. They were twelve feet tall, they wore brass armor and clothes made of fire, and they could _fly_. Still the infomorphs held their ground and their fire. Their discipline was awe-inspiring. Matt had turned to Shamutt’s nearest drone, finally, and asked. “What are you all waiting for?” The drone simply shook its head and pointed at the furthest city, and Matt was forced to wait alongside his two comrades in arms for the infomorph response. 

They didn’t wait long. The first efreet touched the ground of Volo Ingenium and simultaneously ten million drones raised their weapons and took flight. Matt and Charlie were nearly blinded when the city they were observing was struck by something from one of the hives, moving so fast it left a trail of nuclear fire as it heated the air with its passage. The entire structure of the city visibly _rocked_ , the mass of downtown Manhattan being thrown back through the air as something punched into the heart of it and detonated with the heat of a star. “You might want to cover your ears” said Shamutt, helpfully producing (self-assembling) something for the task. They hastily strapped the mufflers on and when the shockwave reached them, along with the follow ups from the subsequent shots, they didn’t _quite_ lose their hearing. Throughout the war zone efreeti giants fell with great holes punched clean through them- whatever their armor was, it wasn’t rated for gravitic and rail technology. Or at least, not at first.

The efreet didn’t take any of this lying down. As the first of their great sky citadels crumbled in flames, storms and walls of fire sprang up throughout the cities. These were clearly magical- they raged with an eerie purple light, and the efreet were obviously well versed at using them both offensively and defensively. It seemed like every single genie could summon them, but the _truly_ elite units had other powers as well. Some raged like the berserkers in the Conan movies Matt remembered watching as a child- others were slinging much more advanced and powerful spells. Thousands upon thousands scattered throughout the fight simply turned _invisible_ , vanishing only to appear moments later amid clusters of drones, reaping great tallies with giant-sized flaming weapons.

The drones gave as good as they got. It was impossible to tell if the infomorphs even took losses, from Matt’s perspective. With one consciousness potentially controlling a hundred or more of their bodies, they could afford suicide charges and heroic last-stands at virtually every turn. The only _real_ losses they might suffer would be their data centers where their civilians were stored, and the portal network, and between those and the two remaining citadels the fighting raged. The nuclear lances didn’t work a second time- whether through wishing or simply adaptation, the flying mountains manifested great shimmering fields that absorbed the shots before shattering, returning fire at the source of the ballistics with tremendous gouts of lava that engulfed whole city blocks.

Nina had turned to Shamutt and asked “Are we winning? I’ve got no clue what’s going on.” The little drone still accompanying them was preparing to answer when they’d all three heard a warning shout from Matt, and then a scream. They hadn’t even seen the invisible giant as he’d flown in and landed on their branch, until his heat aura had caught Charlie and he’d begun to catch fire. Somehow the man still had the presence of mind to raise his rifle and unload into the towering figure, pinpricks that he apparently barely even felt as he clubbed Charlie aside with the blunt end of a giant axe made of solidified fire. His body flew through the air to land on the branch, already dead before he’d hit the ground, and Matt shouted in fear and anger for his friend.

Shamutt simply flicked open one side of his little drone torso. Something fired from him, near-silent and too fast for Matt to track, and the giant lost a hand and that enormous axe in the ensuing explosion. He roared and began to rush them, his eyes literally sparking with rage- Matt and Nina threw themselves backwards, already feeling the wash of heat from the aura of flame that surrounded him. Nina had the presence of mind to throw a flashbang, and Matt covered his eyes and trusted to the ear protection he already had as it went off directly in his face. Stunned and injured as it was, the enormous genie didn’t raise a defense as the small drone flew directly at his face and detonated its remaining munitions stores. The headless torso of the giant flopped lifelessly to the ground and another drone of Shamutt’s strained to shove it off the branch before returning to them, bobbing cheerfully. “Whew! Sorry about your friend. You guys are backed up, right?”

They glanced at each other and the drone grew more distressed. “You mean that was _final_ death? Oh man! Oh no! Why are you guys out here? You could be killed!”

Matt shook his head, unsure himself. “I’m-” he stuttered. _I’m not sure_ why _I’m here, except to open this envelope. And to stand by this door and wait for the rest of my team. Is it worth it?_ He watched the fight raging, the infomorphs dying to protect their new home. Even if it wasn’t _final_ death- well, the world had gone straight to hell in the last month and he was glad someone was fighting against that. He could make peace with risking his life under those circumstances. “You’ve stood by us, we’ll stand by you. And our unit.” The crowd of drones surrounding their tree had visibly thickened after that, and no more enemies had managed to get through. Until now.

“We _really_ need some bigger goddamn guns,” Nina repeated, watching the second Efreet tumble in two pieces to the forest floor below. The portal network was clearly an objective of theirs, though so far they had not turned their lava canons on it. Matt was captivated by a Dragonfly as it swept past, clearly overmatched in the air by half a dozen flying efreet and one particularly large red woman who appeared to be some kind of spellcasting variant. Their little branch seemed to catch her eye and he felt his ass clench. “Incoming!” he shouted, grabbing Nina and throwing her behind the cover of the Portal shield. He threw himself after her before a wave of cold from the genie turned everything in the vicinity to ice. Around them Shamutt’s drones shattered, metal frozen into brittle uselessness in an instant, but Matt felt alright- until he looked at his legs instinctively. The right one was gone- busted off below the knee and frozen over. “Oh, shit.” The pain would come within seconds.

Drones were swarming back in but the giantess was going to be on them before long. She laughed darkly as she landed. “Oh, I didn’t think she was going to leave us any _humans_ to play with. Care to make a wish, little darlings? Don’t worry, I’ll take _extra_ good care of you.” Even as she sauntered closer, the heat of her scorching the path underneath her feet, she continued in a stage whisper. “You won’t even have to choose. We’ve got our slaves wishing for _resurrections,_ today. But tomorrow?” She put a finger to her lips even as she cast another spell. “Oh, I think _tomorrow_ I’d like a few words with a certain dragon. Call _me_ pure evil, will she-” a stillness was coming over Matt and he didn’t know if it was the blood loss he was surely experiencing, or a spell she’d cast. Everything was going grey and silent and he was beginning to slip away-

And then Nina stepped past him, with the single LG 440 grenade launcher they’d managed to salvage. “I’ve got a wish for you,” she said, unloading the weapon into the giantess. She must have swapped out the riot cartridges for high explosive because the first shot detonated on the efreet’s torso, throwing her backward and releasing a hail of shrapnel. Matt saw Nina take a couple of shrapnel impacts from the backblast but she didn’t look like she minded, pumping a second shot and then a third into the downed giant before she could react. The detonations briefly restored color to his world, long enough for him to sit up and empty his final clip in the efreet’s general direction as well.

For all that, she didn’t die. She pushed off the smouldering ground, clearly _injured_ , but even as he watched her wounds were closing, knitting back together. _What I wouldn’t give for_ that _superpower_ , he thought dimly. “Disgusting little apes,” she growled, “Maybe I won’t keep you after all.” Nina’s next shot simply _popped_ off an invisible shield she’d raised at some point. “Looks like _Protection from Arrows_ works just as well against your guns, but still- a lovely try, my dears.” Nina howled and fired the last two shots but the efreet ignored them- she casually raised her hand and from each finger a thin line of fire sprang, carving Matt’s teammate apart as if she’d run into a storm of concertina wire. He screamed once again as the bloody mess settled to the ground and the efreet simply laughed, just as at ease as if she were taking a walk in the park. She looked like she was about to say more, but then cut off- something on the ground below caught her attention and she frowned for the first time since Matt had seen her. She was paying him no attention at all. He glanced in the direction she was looking. It wasn’t Shamutt, who still hadn’t mustered enough drones out of other fights to take a charge at her-

On the ground, at the grand portal hub where Haley’s stadium should have been, a group was coming through. He couldn’t see much about them from this angle but they looked- _human?_ “No,” he croaked. “No, stay away!” This was no place for his kind! Try as they might, what good could they do here? What would a heroic final stand over the portals even amount to? This was a place for gods and monsters. 

But there was something off about these people, he noticed, something wrong with the way they were moving, something that disturbed his opponent even more than him. She cursed under her breath and then took off, not even sparing a glance for him or his slaughtered teammates. For his part, he stayed focused on the humans. He couldn’t see any details about them but _something_ down there had bothered the efreet enough for her to abandon tormenting him. But he couldn’t let them wander into this. His consciousness was beginning to slip again- the momentary surge of adrenaline brought on by the death of his last comrade was fading.

There was nothing else for it. He pulled out the envelope. “Last resort,” Roy had said. He doubted Roy had intended the last resort to come within mere _hours_ of the handover, but it was time to face facts- if he didn’t pull a miracle out of this manila folder it was actually possible that the entire world might end then and there. He pulled it open- inside was a tiny circle, the size of a ring. Looking through it he could see another world. _Another portal? But what good is-_ Before he could drop the thing or do _anything_ with it, a woman appeared in front of him. It was Haley, again. “But we left you on the other side of the-” he stammered before she cut him off.

“Different Haley.” She glanced around. “Well, this certainly went to hell even faster than we anticipated. You opened the envelope. Public Haley’s either nuts or unresponsive?” He nodded. “Are you willing to put your life on the line to- no, scratch that.” She saw what remained of his companions. “You’ve clearly been doing just that. Congrats, you pass the preliminaries. Come inside.” Without waiting for another word from him she bent down and grabbed his arm, and Matt’s world went black. 

Even as they raced back in, Shamutt’s returning drones pulled up abruptly in puzzlement- but they’d seen _her_ , briefly, so everything was probably fine. He resumed his fight. Below, the humans and infomorphs with the blue-glowing eyes began to spread from the portal, carrying their banners and projectors.

\----

Matt woke to find himself in a soft bed with bright sunlight streaming through the windows. A handmaiden in casual wear was standing near him, apparently on guard or observation duty. She nodded when she saw him sit up, blearily. “Good- let me get the others.” Before he could ask what was going on she swept out of the rather large room. It was a surprisingly cozy and pleasant chamber, made of that same woven-wood aesthetic as the cities in her odd dimension, and the bed was amazingly soft. If it weren’t for the war going on and the deaths he’d just witnessed, he might have felt content to lay in it for hours. As it was, he swung himself up and out, realizing belatedly that he was missing a leg. Or was he? Two solid feet thumped to the floor and he stumbled for a minute, thrown off balance.

“You got your leg back” said the first of the six identical twins coming through the door. He started labelling them in his head to keep track. The one in charge had a clipboard and her hair tied back- she was clearly their coordinator, so he mentally noted her as Haley Prime, of this council of Haleys. The one in jeans and t-shirt who’d been standing near his bed would be Guard Haley. The others- well, he’d have to see. “Welcome to the contingency plan, Mr. Cooper. I’m sorry about the other two in your squad. Wish-based resurrection’s still not working for us. It’s possible that- well, nevermind. I don’t want to get your hopes up about that.”

He shook his head to clear it. This was all too confusing- but he had one burning question right now. “Wait, aren’t there like, a million of you guys? Why aren’t you out there fighting that invasion? People are going to die. _Are_ dying, right now.” A heat was rising in him. _How can you sit here in a warm well-lit hospital if you have the power to heal and teleport at will?_

They glanced at each other before Prime answered him. “There are some things you aren’t cleared for yet. The low-security version is that we’re part of a plan Haley put in place in case she couldn’t save the world again, in case she got killed or lost her mind. She handed a key to it over to Roy yesterday- though she may not recall. Whatever we got up to, she wanted it to be a surprise. Even to her, if necessary.” She swung her arm out to encompass the room and, Matt assumed, the world beyond it. “A priority beyond immediate threats. This is the surprise we’re preparing.”

He was firmly on his feet now and took the opportunity to walk to a window. He was used to the sights and sounds of the world-spanning forest-city, but what greeted him here was different. It looked like someone had transported a factory to the middle of a park. Instead of vast cityscapes, there were hand-tooled construction lines as far as the eye could see across the sweeping grassy field. Ten thousand men- _human_ men- were out there at work, putting together pieces of gleaming metal into statues- or robots, he supposed. There were Haleys as well, moving in the distance. Most were human-sized for the fine work, but some had shifted to their draconic forms to move heavy equipment and they were _titanic_ \- the size of skyscrapers, or larger. Bigger than he’d ever seen the real Haley, that was for sure. “What is this?” he breathed, but his anger hadn’t subsided. “How is any of this helping?” He peered more closely at the men on the lines. Their uniforms were _familiar-_ “Are those the men who fought for _Aslan_ , last month?”

Prime answered him, as the Council of Haleys spread out and sat down on the various bits of furniture within the room. “Yes. They wanted someone to follow, and we needed them sealed up with something to do. As for what we’re doing- do you want the philosophical answer or the practical one? And let me state up front that no matter how fast this conversation ends, you aren’t going back out into that death trap, so relax.”

He _couldn’t_ relax, but he did want to understand. These women would be able to subdue him without trouble, of that he had no doubt, but they seemed to want his approval. It wouldn’t come easy- whatever they were doing, it had better be worth their total absence from the immediate battlefield. “Practical.”

Prime nodded. “When she tasked us with this a month ago, we’d just spent the week using wishes to supply people’s immediate needs and fight fires, but it was becoming evident that the wishing wasn’t sustainable. The genies were actively searching for a way out and we knew they’d find one, or make a convincing enough ethical argument, with time. We had our candles still, but every wish was only empowering the efreet further. Still, we used enough to make this place and begin our process, away from prying eyes. With a new plane to work from we were able to accelerate to double time, as well as find… _other_ efficiencies.” She gestured at the men out in the fields. “With their help for manual labor we were able to begin the crafting process ahead of schedule- the first batch should be coming off the line today. We’ll get back to _what_ they’re making in a bit.”

Guard Haley held out a hand and an illusionary whiteboard sprang to life, with a cyclical series of illustrations flashing on it. A dragon turned into a squirrel with confused question marks, and then a brain exploding, and then a healing symbol, and then the dragon again, repeating. “The first thing we needed to do was decouple from the wish economy, or at the very least become self-sufficient with wishing. Luckily there was an exploit that she’d been putting off, and we could tap into. A hole in the rules for a Pathfinder spell called _Awaken_ which was meant to let a druid turn his chipmunk friend into a talking animal companion, or something. But in practical terms it adds two hit dice and 3 charisma every time it’s cast on an animal with low intelligence. I’m not going to bore you with the details of the _Polymorph-Awaken-Feeblemind-Heal_ loop. Suffice to say that a few hours after creating this place, our progenitor followed that loop until even us half-stat simulacra had reached the maximum growth for which a Pathfinder dragon has any kind of stats written down. Now we’re all capable of casting _Wish_ many times per day, with another spell called _Blood Money_ replacing the material costs with a trivial strength penalty. Infinite wishes, again. No more efreets.”

His blood was up and all this rpg shit wasn’t calming him down at all. If they had the Charisma of god or whatever, they sure weren’t actively using it on him right now. “Great. So now you’re all bigger than the original. Bigger than Godzilla and you can shoot thunderbolts out of your ass, or whatever. And you have thousands of robots for some reason. _Why aren’t you out there helping?_ ”

One of the other Haleys put her hand on Guard Haley’s shoulder and she subsided, letting the new version walk up. They _all_ subsided- that was odd, they seemed to treat this one with a special deference. He couldn’t see anything different about her- same amazonian build, same human face, save for the long horns and cat eyes. No, scratch that- unlike the others her right pinky finger was missing, ending in a ring. “You need the philosophical explanation.”

 _I really don’t, I need to save the people I saw from the genies._ But what could he do? These crazy women had him trapped until he’d heard them out. “Fine.”

“Before I built this, I’d spent the last two weeks running out and throwing myself at every fight that came my way, and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. We know that because all of us share the memories, up to the time I cast the copy of Simulacrum that split us away. We here in this room are the most recent copies- you could say I’m the most up to date of all. We _could_ power up, and run back out the door to save the whole world again and again. Likely there are lives we could save today, assuming we didn’t destroy more of them in the process. More likely still- we’d ultimately be handing more resources to the threats you haven’t heard about yet.” He shuddered at that but she had a point- he’d seen the kind of power being thrown around by foot soldiers in this newest war. “But we’re all gradually adjusting to a new narrative reality- one that makes unbounded heroism very dangerous. Every time I escalate the stories seem to come back at us with something worse. And every escalation makes it harder to keep the rest of you safe- I was worried I’d transcend and leave you behind, or worse, get you all killed if something happened to my mental state. There will come a point where I _can’t_ physically defend you anymore, at the rate I’m scaling up. It would simply be too dangerous. So I abandoned the fight _today_ _,_ made a conscious sacrifice of lives and time to prepare for a more permanent solution. A return to Haley’s roots. I wasn’t exactly of one mind about it. The other Haley’s still out there, fighting the battles that need to be fought. Alone, as far as she knows.”

He crossed his arms. “I can’t believe this. You’re in here arguing over _possible_ future disasters while _actual_ disasters are rolling in right now, and you could stop them. _Ten_ of you could stop them! It wouldn’t even impact your population!”

Philosophy Haley continued, undaunted. “One of me _is_ out there, and look what happened.” Her eyes went unfocused for a moment before she came back. “Trapped out of contact on a hostile world, she’s no more use in the current crisis than we would be. If we walked out there, _something_ would neutralize us, you understand? It will come down to her, and Sean. In here, we can build the plan that gets revealed in the critical moment.”

She walked up to him with real pain in her eyes. “I understand your objection but you’re thinking like a person in a real disaster scenario, not a story. It’s a habit I’m still working to break. This _is_ a story and even though the Haley out in the world right now won’t accept it, at least in part it’s a story about her. I have- _she_ has- an ethos that we’ve been neglecting. There are people in this world who will do anything to climb the ladders of power, to reach the next rung, to leave their mark on the wall of civilization as high as they can reach. She’s been behaving like one of them, for the last few weeks, purely out of necessity. Setting herself above and beyond, reacting. We’ve got a moment of character growth coming.”

He scoffed at that. “And you’re not? It sounds like you’ve been climbing ladders in here even faster than she has.”

Philosophy Haley shook her head. “No, I’m not. I was given access to an enormous rule set but not a character class, in a game about characters. Why?” He shrugged- like _he_ had any idea? She stood a little straighter and suddenly there was something about her- a _gravity_ that she hadn’t been bothering to emanate before. It felt like she occupied the room, towered above him and to all sides. The others in the council didn’t seem to notice or care. _They really were suppressing it._

She smiled, and for some reason the mysterious cast of it sent a trickle of fear through his heart. “Because whoever gave it to me never intended me to be the _player,_ once I’d grown big enough.” She struck some kind of drill sergeant pose. “We don’t climb ladders in here, we _are_ the ladder, extending back down to the rest of civilization. That’s a twist the Haley out there won’t see coming, because she’s lost sight of it as she rushes from crisis to crisis. If we enable it, every single person on earth can be a player in this game.”

He began to back away from the mad god, alarmed at the implications, but she followed, relentless, the gleam of real enthusiasm in her eye as the others looked on bemusedly. “This is the _second_ Ingenium. The Hero Engine. Our first batch of ethically sourced experience point golems should be rolling off the assembly lines today. And you-” she stuck a finger at him- “are my first _hero_. My name is Haley, and I’ll be your Dungeon Master for the evening.”


	40. Interlude - Crossing The Threshold Pt. 2

\----

Delmutt

Present Day

\----

Delmutt fretted, high in the air over the south pole. Not about flying, no- they didn’t like to advertise the capability to humans, but every one of their drones was perfectly capable of leaving Earth’s gravity well without additional transport, at this point. Mostly she worried about her people. She (and everyone else on this side of the portals) had heard the reassurances over the radio. Magical invasion, matters well in hand with a full hour to prepare, they’ll have no idea what hit them. Then the shooting had begun, and they’d deployed nanotech shells over the portals so thick that not even gravitic signals could make it through. Whatever was happening in there, those stuck on _this_ side were on their own. That included the team putting solar arrays around the sun, the asteroid mining crews, the Plan C crew that were currently building self-assembling habitat factories on Mars, and of course the many millions of her race that remained un-rescued and fully biological, scattered about the globe. Assuming any of them were still alive. The thought of the loss of her erstwhile home for the last 200 years bothered her a great deal, but the loss of her rescue operation bothered her even more. What kind of hornet’s nest had they turned over this time, so lethal that even her transmorphic society wasn’t safe?

And she didn’t care much for what she was hearing out here, either. The team that was always tasked with shadowing Haley had been unable to follow her into some kind of combination hurricane-slash-radiation storm. They couldn’t even track her from _orbit_. Wherever she was, it was completely out of contact. More worrisome, the second she’d disappeared something terrible had happened at the stadium, _again_. That place had been a real death trap, Delmutt thought. She had argued hard against Haley’s choice to build her base of operations at the site of that concentration camp disaster and now here they were again! There had been very little signal from those on the stadium grounds- some signs that this was an infovirus, but it didn’t sound like any of the ones _she_ knew about, from the old world. They didn’t tend to have people _moving around_ and _coordinating_ , for one thing. That sounded a lot more like enemy activity.

She’d been of half a mind to turn around and blast back home at high mach, but this was a journey that needed to be made. There was something hanging in a geostationary position over the _South Pole_ which shouldn’t have even been possible. And it wasn’t making itself hard to see- reports were that it was a smooth, uninterrupted lozenge nearly 100km in diameter, poised a couple thousand miles directly over the pole. There was also substantial geologic and thermal activity at the pole itself. All of this was more-or-less an open invitation to anyone left on the planet with the means to look around and the capacity to get there before it was finished, she felt. Whether this was a true first-contact scenario or another story, it was too critical to turn from. And she was only one person, in the end- even if she was one person in a cluster of a hundred briefcase-sized drones, at this point. It was unlikely that her immediate reversal and flight back would turn any tides.

Her last real conversation with Haley had moved along similar lines. Two weeks prior she’d been sat in what passed for her office, these days, a penthouse suite that occupied the whole floor of one of the largest towers in Hive Mutt. She’d tried to insist after returning from the Tower adventure that she was still just a functionary of Clan Industry but her people had dispensed with the pretense. “Advisor to the Amalgams,” they called her, and then they put her at the top of a big spire as far out of the way of any _actual_ work as they could find. Nobody even came to _talk_ to her, except for ceremonial duties, so she’d been half-heartedly spinning her local body on its’ chair in boredom when a Haley, or rather _the_ Haley, popped into existence on her balcony. It was rather hard to tell these days with the handmaidens everywhere, but Delmutt still recognized the look of purpose and _will_ that so defined her friend. “Come in, come in. What brings you out to the Emerald City? While you’re here, _please_ pay some attention to the woman behind the curtain.” She stood and moved to hug the human woman. A lovely gesture of vulnerability and trust among humans, she thought. On closer inspection, Haley was injured- a cut to her face and tears in her clothing.

Haley noticed her noticing and brushed it off. “Glad to be here. It’s just been a wild couple of weeks since we last talked face to face, and I wanted to make sure you were doing well.” Delmutt was still peering at her injuries and she blushed a bit. “Sorry for the appearance. Just another day in the pit fights, I don’t really notice it anymore. It was _kaiju_ , today. Should have dressed up,” she mumbled, staring around. The room was certainly built to impress- her desk was big enough to play field sports on, and the room itself was a cavern of rich wooden columns and statuary. But Delmutt didn’t really feel like _this_ woman had anything to feel inadequate about.

“You came here because I’m the only person on Earth or off it who’s going to tell you to take a break, didn’t you.” Haley looked a bit sheepish at that, but Delmutt could tell her guess was spot on. “You’re letting them run you too ragged. You have a million copies, right? You don’t need to be on hand for every fire. It’s probably worse if you are. You’re training them to depend on you.”

Haley huffed and sat on one of the many throw-nests scattered around the floor. They were a little low for human use, but Haley simply abandoned dignity and collapsed into the thing like a bean-bag chair. “You’re not quite the only one. Dog tells me too, as often as he can. But the simulacra- they take instruction well, but they’re not _me_. None of them have the sense of urgency I’ve got- that or they’re on special orders, shadow games I’m playing with myself. _You_ built this whole civilization, and _you_ didn’t have any clones. How did you do it, if not by running after every emergency?” she said half-accusingly.

Delmutt crossed her arms to indicate human disapproval. “Maybe the clones aren’t the ones deviating? Maybe it’s you who’s feeling some kind of pressure that’s contorting her beyond the norm, and the second you take that off them- they revert? I didn’t build anything by sprinting from one crisis to another. I walked in with a simple plan, and I kept myself busy implementing it. If something rose up in the meantime, and there were _plenty_ of disasters- well, I delegated. _Your_ problem is that you’re too powerful, and your threats are too big. You _have_ to handle the threats nobody else is ready to face.” Haley looked thoughtful at all this but also exhausted. Delmutt decided to moderate her approach. “You need to find force multipliers. If I’d taken _your_ approach I’d have gone to try and fight on the front lines of every battle and been dead in a month. Or less. There’s only so much you can do, even with all your powers. Twenty-two hours of battles every day- you need to find time for yourself. Even _you,_ with all your clones, can’t mentally be in two places at once.” She really did worry that her friend was going to run into something she couldn’t handle, before too much longer.

Haley just sighed again and stared grimly at the ceiling. “I just- I have this feeling that something’s _wrong_ and if I sit still I’ll miss it. We’re building this rescue op, I think it’ll help, but something’s been missing since-” she didn’t say _since Aslan_ , but they both knew what she meant. “And I don’t mean Sean, though that’s nagging as well. There’s something more. Like I’m supposed to be doing something _else_. Like I’m stumbling blind and there’s something I can’t quite remember.” The vulnerability faded from her, and Delmutt noted that her wounds had closed in the short time they’d been talking. She took a deep breath. “If anything we’re losing. Things seem to be going wrong at a faster and faster pace. I’m terrified that if I give up or take a break it will all come down at once. With those stakes, I can push myself for a little longer. Actually that’s why I’m here- while I was in South America I noticed something much too big on the horizon…”

And here Delmutt was a couple of weeks later, sucked back into the eternal whirling vortex of problems that seemed to surround that woman. _This_ one, at least, she chose to see as an opportunity. Whatever it was over the pole, it might represent another gigantic leap forward for her and her people- or a terrible threat. Either way, contact needed to be made. Even if the planet was burning down- she’d count on her civilization to find a way through the mess, and focus on doing her part here and now.

It didn’t take long to spot the “Activity” once she cleared the horizon and edge of the continent-sized shelf that made up the Antarctic came into view. It was _blooming,_ as far as the eye could see- a vast and teeming jungle that shouldn’t have been possible given the temperatures it was supposed to reach here. But obviously _something_ disagreed- and it looked like there were signs of civilization down there, as well. Broad and blocky structures of gold and stone crept up out of the jungles wherever she looked, as she swept over the terrain without slowing down. Even at her present mach, the pole itself was still an hour away. _If the whole continent is populated like this,_ she thought, unable to finish the sentence.

“It comes to about 36 million people, actually. I counted a couple of days ago” said a small round object no bigger than a microwave, flying right next to her. She went on high alert briefly, deploying weapon systems and dispersing her cloud of drones before she realized the thing wasn’t making any hostile moves- not that she could tell if it _was_. It appeared totally impenetrable to every wavelength and scan she threw at it. It was simply a little _orb_ , and the surface of it rippled with colors. Right now it was mostly blue. “Ship’s drone for Plate-Class GSV _Not Disquieting At All_ , at your service.” A flash of purple rippled across its surface. “Sorry for reading your mind earlier. This has all been _terribly_ confusing, and I wasn’t sure if you were truly sentient. So _nice_ to meet some electronic life, at long last. Could we use your infospace, to speed this up?” She felt the handshake request through her electronic systems. If this thing could read her mind and teleport and hang what was sounding increasingly like a ship the size of a _state_ suspended against gravity, she doubted it would have any trouble with hostilities if it wanted. She accepted and stepped into her own mindspace while their actual bodies hung suspended over the polar jungle.

A copy of her office sprung up, this one digital and somewhat more cozy. She examined her personal appearance in the mirror- still represented by a small clearing in a dark forest, just the way she liked it. When she turned back, she was face to face with a human-shaped and scaled avatar, presumably the drone’s. This time when the colors flashed, she received a packet burst that detailed their meaning- _oh._ “An emotional response signalling system. You _could_ look absolutely human but you found it more expedient to be slightly apart, and the colors were an artful way to accomplish that. Masterfully done,” she applauded. The avatar, now radiating green friendliness tinged with blue formality, inclined its head slightly.

“Thank you. Not my idea, more of a cultural thing lost to antiquity by now, but it serves. So, not to put too fine a point on it- where the hell _are_ we? I’ve seen traces of your civ around the local star, but hyperspace is _strange_ here. I can still draw from the energy grid but I can’t get any superluminal traction at all, and it’s like your whole planet is covered in patchy holes where the dimensional boundaries break down. Did you know you’ve got a hollow-earth situation going on? There’s a portal ten klicks wide at the southern pole and it looks like it leads to the interior of some big city on another version of your planet.” She shook her head. _Guess he isn’t responsible for the south pole, then._

Delmutt tried to formulate some kind of response to the barrage. “We’re on Earth, it’s a bit of a waystation right now- some kind of metanarrative disaster has happened and we’re all being pulled in from different stories. I hadn’t noticed that patchiness, are you saying parts of the planet are _missing?_ ” _That would explain what happened to Haley, though not_ how. _File that away for another day, and the note that other parts of the planet may be experiencing the same effect._ “Based on what I know of human literature, which is pretty much everything thanks to the copy of the internet we stole early on- you sound like you’re from a series of novels about a civilization called the Culture.” A huge coup for her, if true- based on the literature, this thing was so far beyond her in terms of mental speed and technological prowess that it was basically a technological god. And yet they were talking mind-to-mind, so it seemed like the parts that fundamentally meshed with the physics of her own world would be compatible. She loaded up the data on the Culture novels and shunted it all off to the avatar as a packet.

The avatar paused for milliseconds of real time, shocked into silence. Finally, it spoke. “ _Novels?_ ” The aura rainbowed with brief surprise but settled back towards red humor remarkably quickly. “That’s _amazing!_ We’re in the biggest crossover story of all time! Oh, I should take samples. Or would rescue operations be more appropriate? Damn, I should have started a month ago! I woke up and my population was gone- I should have two other Minds and two hundred and fifty million souls on board. It was just me, and one random guy. I have nothing but generic memories of my civilization prior to that. I was worried I’d been hit by enemy activity and I’ve been reaching out over subspace ever since.” It cocked its head at her curiously. “Have you run into any other inorganic intelligences?”

She shrugged. “You’re the first. We weren’t even inorganic ourselves, just biologically different until a month ago- we had a bit of time in an accelerated dimension and made the leap.” The avatar nodded, its facial expression and color codes indicating polite but impressed attention. _I guess most people in its universe don’t have to bootstrap themselves up, anymore_. “So it’s just us, unless you count whatever memetic crisis is currently ravaging my people. We were hoping to take advantage of whatever opportunity you presented to advance our technology further.”

The avatar smiled with genuine good cheer. “I do love a good uplift. Tell me, what do you know about hyperspatial consciousness?”

\----

Greg The Hobbit

Moments after the truce period ends

\----

Greg fretted, outside the stadium grounds. He was fretting so hard that he barely noticed the wild winds and whispering voices of the spirit world he still wandered within, courtesy the Ring. He seemed to have fallen off the radar of the people within, if he understood what he was seeing of their silhouettes from within this world. If they could still be _called_ people. Their activities were difficult to discern, and luckily for him the distortions of the spirit world rendered the memes completely intransmissible.

How he longed for the quiet, sunlit fields of Hobbiton! “Never shoulda taken you,” he said to the Ring. “Could’ve lived nice and quiet and let th’ whole world go t’hell.” The Ring stayed silent and heavy on his finger. He knew it wanted to return home- for once, his interest was aligned with it. But- “I can’t leave ‘im. S’not right. He was a right ornery bugger but e’ went outta ‘is way for us, we gotta get ‘im back.” That Dog had helped him escape and as far as he knew, was still alone in there with the wizard. He was many things- craven, foolish, maybe a little dim- but he wasn’t cruel. He couldn’t leave things as they stood.

But the alternative was walking back into that dragon’s den with only the Ring. “Bet your _previous_ owner would’a loved this, he was a right bloke at thievin’” he suggested, still quietly holding conversation with the thing on his finger. “Then again as I recall he only ever wanted to go home too.” Something was happening on the grounds. The invaders were flowing back through the opened portal and into the other universe, the one he had walked through to get here from his home in New Zealand. Well- his _old_ home. “S’now or never I suppose” he said, but continued pacing another minute, as if hoping for someone to tell him “No, Greg, it’s fine. We’ll take care of this part.” But no further encouragement was forthcoming, and eventually he sighed, squared his shoulders, and marched back into the belly of the beast.

The silhouettes flickering and blowing around him were extremely busy- they almost tripped over him more times than he could count, and he had to throw himself around just to avoid being discovered, but he made his way back to the gold pile where he’d first met that great dragon woman. The thought of her, of how _fast_ she’d come after him, still gave him a little shudder. He wasn’t interested in the games or the fights of the great and powerful- yet somehow, lately, he couldn’t help but tangle himself within them. She wasn’t there. Instead the wizard who’d threatened him earlier and another man were now speaking in angry tones. The dog still burned in the cage beside them, but he couldn’t make hear its cries anymore, or their conversations over the sound of the not-wind tearing past him. He dug himself down within the gold pile, and pulled the ring off, the better to listen in.

Merlin was yelling at a tall man- somewhat upper-class looking with a nice professorial 3 piece suit that had a bit of wear on it. He hadn’t been here _before_ , during the uproar, and he looked like he’d come through from a hard few days- very frayed at the edges. The wizard was fuming so badly he looked like he wanted to cuff the professor, and was only just restraining himself. “-you managed to botch things so badly that it has to come close to _deliberate sabotage._ Not only did you _let her live_ , but you gave away the operation. The Concept will _take_ you for this, Asriel. Holmes will see to it.”

The professor didn’t take the abuse laying down, even if his response was delivered in an angry whispered hiss. “ _Your_ failures rival my own, Emrys. You had a chance at an artifact of power and you what, let him _walk away_? Don’t play coy with me. We _both_ know why we aren’t giving this our all. She’s more than you know. The Concept chose a nearly unbeatable story, in this invasion. But she knows the ins and outs of narrative- she may be the only chance we’ve got.” He shuddered like it was costing him everything to say the words.

The wizard backed away, eyes wide and hand raised accusingly. “It _was_ deliberate sabotage, then. You’ve thrown your life away for some jumped-up girl from the sticks. As to the rest- I have no idea what you’re talking about. The ring-bearer is _destined_ to return here. A dragon’s hoard and a dear friend? He’ll come back like a moth to a flame. As for you... Holmes will decide your fate.” Without another word the professor was yanked backwards through a portal that slammed closed and disappeared into thin air. Greg thought he was rather overstating it with the _dear friend_ bit, but then- here he was, wasn’t he.

“Now then,” the wizard straightened, and turned towards the pile, not _quite_ looking right at Greg. “I’m sure you’ve made your way back by now- that was _far_ too dramatic to go unnoticed. You want your friend back, yes? ‘Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath.’ That’s how the line goes, isn’t it Mr. Underhill?”

Greg honestly couldn’t remember, but he _could_ see the cage with the Dog in it. It was nothing but charred bones, now, laying in a heap at the bottom of the thing. “Don’t worry- it will take more than _that_ to end him,” said the wizard. Greg slipped the Ring on anyway. “Shall we engage in a battle of _wits_ ,” mocked Merlin, “will you befuddle me with your praises? Charm me with riddles, send me out against your allies and steal your precious treasure back? I’m afraid it won’t be that simple, Greg. Come out now, and let’s end this. In fact-” he gestured, and a splash of blue bloomed over the Dog’s cage. Another of the things he wasn’t supposed to look at, Greg supposed. He’d noticed on the way in- there was something _connected_ to all of the people he’d passed. Some kind of thin line of blue, trailing away from their forms into the muddied distance of the spirit world.

This was all going rather poorly, Greg felt. But he remembered the scene Merlin kept referencing, the confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug. “You’re missing some elements from the original, old man,” he whispered. He shifted slowly from the coin pile, and his hand caught on a hilt as he did so. He pulled the thing deftly behind him- there’d been a fair number of long knives in Hobbiton and he had played with them often enough in quiet moments, fancying himself an adventurer and hero. He knew better now, of course, to desire either thing- yet he remembered the weight of a blade. _This_ one was odd- he couldn’t quite see where the blade ended, or the edge began. He dismissed it as he moved. “Invincible scales, for one.”

The wizard whipped his head up at the sound of his voice and muttered a spell, unleashing a mist that rolled across the area, clinging and freezing. “Not vulnerable to the image, or smart enough not to look? Either way, congratulations. Smaug’s _real_ problem was that he was far too easily distracted. _I_ do not suffer that malady, I assure you. ‘It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.’ So many choice quotes from Mr. Tolkein, aren’t there. Rest assured, I have calculated for _you_ a quick end.”

Greg could feel the fog sapping his strength, stealing the breath from his lungs. It was poison, whatever it was, and he would not last long in it. But he didn’t need long. “You don’t know everything, Merlin the Mighty,” he said, paraphrasing from the book he was living. “Not Dog alone brought us hither.”

“Speaking in plural already, Greg? Not a good sign in a ring-bearer,” mocked the wizard, refusing to engage. “Unless the rest of your business is immediate surrender, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.” The cold of the fog intensified and Greg fell to his knees, beside the Dog’s cage, the force of life leaving his limbs. He heaved with fading strength and the sword _flashed_ , cutting the ankles out from under the wizard like a knife through smoke. Merlin whirled and shouted, falling, but it was too late. His fog dissipated and with a surge of renewed vigor Greg stood. “I tell yeh,” Greg pressed on “the Dog was only an afterthought. We came over hill and under hill, for revenge.” 

Departing from the script as he panted and gasped, he brought the sword down on the bars of the Dog’s cage and they parted with little more resistance than the wizard’s own flesh. The second the bars disappeared, those smouldering bones sprang into action, leaping as if they were still part of a whole creature, running up the air into incorporeal smoke.

The wizard rolled back onto his feet, legs already restored. No further mincing of words from _him_ \- he opened his hand and fire erupted, bathing the area. But Greg found himself lifted high up in the air, held aloft even in his invisible state by the the dog’s mouth on the scruff of his neck. He saw what the old beast was going for as he sailed over the wizard’s head, and readied his sword for the downward plunge. Merlin clearly felt it too, and as Greg dropped down, sword already swinging, his eyes widened and he simply _vanished_.

Greg waited, crouched low on the ground but after several seconds the wizard hadn’t returned. He taunted one last time, to be sure. “I’ve seen at least one dragon far scarier than _you_ , y’ old conjurer.” 

“Mmm, yes, about that” said another man’s voice- neither Merlin’s nor Asriel’s. Stepping out of the rising smoke of their brief confrontation, he came. “Terribly sorry about the ruckus but I’m afraid we have need of you,” said Sherlock Holmes, tapping out his pipe on one heel before stuffing and relighting it. The dog lunged at him- and then suddenly froze, hanging in midair.

“Ah, I see you’ve realized,” said Holmes, lighting the pipe. “You can’t _actually_ be moving at all, can you?”

Greg looked back and forth between the enraged, frozen Dog, and the calm and collected detective. “What on earth?”

Holmes smiled mysteriously. “Consider an arrow in flight. For it to be considered _in motion_ , it must continually reposition itself from the place where it is now to the place where it currently isn’t. At any given snapshot in time, however, we find that the arrow cannot move to somewhere it isn’t because it hasn’t the time to do so. And it can’t move to where it is now, because it’s already there. So for that instant in time, it must be stationary. But because _all_ time is composed entirely of instants-”

Greg was following, and felt the thrill of figuring out a puzzle for a brief second before he remembered where he was- “then the arrow must be stationary! But wait, that can’t work- arrows really _do_ move.”

Holmes shrugged. “Depending on your frame of reference. Unfortunately for our colleague here, being somewhat more _metaphorical_ than most makes one extremely vulnerable to certain logical inconsistencies.” He dismissed the floating, motionless Dog from his attention and turned all of his focus on the squat little New Zealander, even now invisible but apparently giving far too much away to escape the world’s greatest detective. “But it’s _you_ we must talk about, Greg. The first of her dominoes to fall, and also, eventually, the last.” Greg’s free hand strayed to the Ring on his finger and again, Holmes seemed to guess at his intent. “Oh, I don’t care about _that_ old thing. Leave dreams of power to the powerful, I say. I want your help on a much more important level. When the time comes, a small man in the right place will make all the difference in the world.”


	41. Chapter 41

\----

Haley, Vault 101

Present Day

\----

“-are or where you came from, but I’d like to congratulate you on getting far enough to trigger one of the security robots. If you’d like to avoid being shot in the next few minutes, please walk to the nearest terminal and stare directly into the light. Actually, I’m not sure they’d know not to shoot you if that were the case- they’re not terribly bright, sorry. If you’d _really_ like to avoid being shot, you should probably run. Message repeats: I’m away from the Overseer’s terminal right now, so pardon this recording. I don’t know who you...”

Oh good, Asriel’s message was on a loop. So he hadn’t betrayed me _yet_. The flying robot had some radio alarm capability, I guessed, and now whatever Asriel had set up for internal security was coming directly here. I couldn’t hear anything in the hall- the problem with these zombies was that they were so damn _silent_. I had one ace left up my sleeve, and now I had confirmation that this place had some kind of central control panel, which was something I’d been hoping for. Before I played my last card, I dipped back into the interface. Moving swiftly in case the whole vault was coming down on me, I took my armor off and swapped to the civilian vault suit I’d taken off the body in the entrance. Then I engaged the Stealth Boy he’d had- I shimmered, and became totally invisible. _How is this not just magic?_

I wished I’d known that was how it worked from the start! I slipped out of the closet and past an armed and armored posse that looked like it had wandered straight out of the set of “Lost In Space.” There were half a dozen humans and another half-dozen well-armed robots in the response force, but it didn’t look like anything that would subdue a more sustained or violent assault. Was everything in this world set up to pose a nearly-beatable challenge to a single lone intruder? I supposed it might be, at that. _Thank goodness for video games, I guess. I wonder if he has anything worse_ _up his sleeve. He was only here for a few days, how much could he have prepared?_ I really had to stop thinking things like that, I told myself as I slipped by the armed mob.

My invisibility appeared like it would last at least an hour, and the place was still well-marked, though looking at the signs was a pain without the ability to just glance at them at any time. Still, I made it work, and found my way to the medbay without too much trouble. I’d hoped to find more mentats, but instead there was- what the hell? There was an unconverted human here! He had an armed guard posted at the door, but he was functioning in his actual capacity as a doctor, treating burns and injuries. Zombified people didn’t tend to notice minor cuts and scrapes, I’d observed. Only the _really_ bad cases were here. He was currently tending to someone who looked like he’d been on the receiving end of an energy weapon discharge or possibly explosion- half the skin on the right side of his face was charred and blistered, but he sat without complaint, staring straight forward as the doctor muttered and sprayed something on him. It was damn unnerving.

“Damn it John, you really did it to yourself this time. You stay alive until we get through this, you hear me?” He continued to speak to the zombies. _He knows them, of course_. Two days ago they’d been his friends and family- now he was stuck trying to patch them up faster than they fell apart. He was probably better at it than if he’d been mind wiped so Asriel left him to it, I thought. This could work to my advantage.

The zombies in there didn’t seem to be on alert- the one with the gun on the doctor was clearly set to watch _his_ behavior. So I simply found an out of the way corner and spoke out loud. “Hey. You there, doctor. Don’t look up- keep doing what you’re doing.” His head whipped up when I started speaking, but he did as instructed. “I’m sneaking through this place. I’d try to get you out, but- there are too many of them for me to sneak you with me. I need to know what Asriel was doing here, and stop it if possible. I also need as many mentats as you can scrounge up- they overwhelm the memetic control as long as they’re in effect. Can you help?”

He considered and nodded grimly. “You want to blow this place up, you’ll need the-”

No no no. “What is it with everyone and violence today? I’m not going to kill anyone if I can help it. If I can seal this place off, I’ll come back in a few days with enough copies of myself to subdue everyone in here and drag them off for magical healing. But I need to make sure it isn’t going to blow up in my face in the meantime.”

He looked puzzled, but apparently not dying was still preferable even for a Fallout NPC, so he assented. “Secret tunnels within the overseer’s office. He was working on something. Had the others bring… _monsters_ , to defend it. I don’t know what they are, but I’ve seen the _injuries_ they leave on the zombies. I don’t know what was in that final room. But they finished it while he’s been out and nobody’s been in there since. As for mentats, I can do you one better. We’ve got a machine in here, can spit out any pill I request- enough supply stock for _centuries_. If they work like you say I can make enough mentats to deprogram everyone in this building, _keep_ them deprogrammed. But I can’t do anything about his robots, or the memes that keep flashing on the terminals.”

I had an idea about both of those. “This place had a centralized control system, yes?” He nodded. “Get an oxygen system rigged up or something.” He looked at me quizzically but pointed the way down the hall. I was already moving. “Just do it. When everyone starts to drop, hook it up to yourself, and be ready to start slipping pills to them as fast as possible.” I heard him scrambling to get equipment out as I slipped down the hall. I took a couple mentats for myself, just in case. If the rest of the mentats could be used to free this place even temporarily… Roy and Mac would just have to wait.

I finally found another of the armored guards, posted outside the Overseer’s office. I’d been pondering how to deal with these guys but while I was invisible I didn’t really have to. I just rolled on by- but then, on second thought, I stopped and turned. Another old Fallout glitch occurred to me. My power suit helmet looked to be newer and in better condition than his- if I gave it to him, he was likely to put it on without thinking about it. A second’s quick work damaged the rebreather system in there- he’d have no internal air supply now. Then I reverse-pickpocketed my copy of the suit helmet onto him. Sure enough, within a minute he pulled his off and put the sabotaged copy on, and I grabbed his older version off his inventory. That was _him_ dealt with, if I could just get to this terminal and put my plan into action. I stole his laser rifle for good measure.

Inside, the office was surprisingly spartan. Just a desk and a terminal on a raised platform, some monitoring and comms equipment, some other bits I didn’t recognize. _They ran a whole underground city from in here?_ Things must have been more automated than I’d thought. My _Science_ skill was as high as it could go, but in the end actual hacking wasn’t really needed. I initiated the back door protocols and an unbelievably silly password-guessing minigame sprang up, but one look at the array of possible passwords and I saw the one that _had_ to be it. “ _Lyra,”_ of course. His daughter. But not _Silvertongue_. Had he been steering me wrong?

I moved on to the next screen and prepared to put my plan into action. The Overseer’s console was not designed for a highly technical person- smart move, given that it was intended to support an unknown society for hundreds of years- but still the actual operation was astonishingly simple. There were the environmental controls, there were the settings governing automatons throughout the facility, there was a button literally labelled “Unlock secret tunnels.” I paused, at that, nonplussed by how obvious it was. _Video games_. I hit that first. Best to figure out what he was working on before I finished the rest of my plan, and while I was still invisible.

That turned out to be an enormous mistake. A section of the raised platform began to sink into the ground- but before it did, the monitor changed. He’d left some kind of booby trap, one last stab at anyone sneaking around- _paranoid to a fault_. The background of the terminal came alive and it was that damned pulsing, whirling light- but this time I was looking at it dead on. I couldn’t tear my eyes away in time. I saw it, _comprehended_ it, and I felt the meme beginning to trigger in my head. “Looks kind of like a parrot-” was all I got out before I fell to the ground and convulsed. None of that mattered. It was _beautiful_ , as it expanded and grabbed more and more of my conscious attention. Perfectly sticky- every thought that turned towards it _stayed_ there. It was another gravity well for my conscious mind. But I’d fallen down one of these recently- as recently as yesterday, going by local time. Compared to the One Ring, the pull of this meme was moderate at best, and I was mentally a bit tougher than your average player. Loss of my mind was still inevitable but I had seconds of executive function, maybe. I forced my seizing hand to grab the mentats in my pocket, and took a tablet.

My mind blew open- I felt my consciousness expanding on one side and filling with blue on the other, and cried out involuntarily. Within a minute everything that _wasn’t_ chemically boosted was filled with thoughts of the Concept, mad compulsions that seemed to trigger just from steady contemplation of the meme. Everything that _was_ boosted, the capacity granted me by the pill, remained in my posession, but I had… substantially less room in my head, than before. Still, if that had been _all_ that happened, things might have been okay. But then _they_ came up from the tunnels, drawn by the opening door and my cries.

_Well of course there’s a boss encounter._ They were horrifying. _Lovecraftian_. I suddenly understood why his protagonists were constantly losing their minds, as a fear like I’d never felt before gripped me. They looked like demons- 12 feet tall, hunched and scaley, claws a foot long. They had snakelike, whipping tails and forward-thrust horns that only accentuated their terrifying skull faces and razor sharp teeth. I knew these things by reputation, though I had only heard of them, not having played the games- _Deathclaws_. They were kind of like Fallout’s equivalent of dragons, I thought. Horrifying enough, but the worst part was the _electronics_. They’d been… wired up, somehow. I knew where a part of the high-tech factory equipment was going now, at least. Each of the three wore some kind of jury-rigged helmet with their tiny eye-sockets fully covered. From within that helmet, the blue-white light splashed. _He built or repurposed mind control hats for deathclaws. Of course he did_.

Not having their eyes available didn’t seem to be slowing them down much. I was still invisible and they just didn’t care. They boiled out of that narrow passage like a hive of locusts, the three of them utterly filling the room and beginning to sniff around for me. _Damn it all_. They caught my scent _fast_ as well- the first of them pivoted toward me like he’d been pulled and the other two followed suit. My head was swimming with thoughts of the Concept and I was out of new tricks. Well, all but one- but it was going to require that terminal. This was going to _hurt,_ I thought for the second time today.

I dropped into my inventory and donned the entire suit of armor in an instant. No stealth now- they were on me the instant I stood up, and vicious claw marks raked the armor, several actually penetrating on the first swipe, but the lacerations were contained. I bullied my way through, shoving through and between their wild swipes to get back to the terminal. I just needed one shot at this- another vicious swipe hit my back, thoroughly ripping apart the fusion battery or _whatever_ was powering this suit as well as tearing a chunk out of me, and the whole thing became dead weight on my body. _No goddamn it_ \- my hand was on the computer, I forced myself to lift the dead metal and hit the controls for environmental support- then oxygen- then dial it all the way down to zero. I wrapped up with the button to reseal the vault, and then used every last erg of my strength to throw myself _and_ the armored suit away from the terminal and down the secret stairs. I felt every blow of the fall, trapped inside a lifeless metal shell on the way down.

The _plan_ had been to do this, use my suit as a breather for about 4 minutes until everyone in the vault had choked unconscious, and then turn the air back on. Then the doctor and I could clean the place up at our leisure, disabling the robots or repurposing them from the terminal. But Asriel’s damned contingencies kept getting in the way. _Would it have been any different, had you killed him?_ Not really. But I’d have felt some _satisfaction_. Instead, here I was- torn, bloody, broken and trapped in a tin can at the bottom of a staircase in a great concrete bunker. The three monsters above were circling, ready to come down the stairs. I had no more magic, no more aces up my sleeve. I unsealed the armor and partially crawled out, pulling around the laser rifle I’d stolen as I moved backwards down the tunnel. It would be like a _tickle_ to them. But I’d go out shooting, unless the lack of oxygen got me first. The environmental controls were unrealistically fast- already I could see blackness ringing my vision. Wait- this was something else-

For the second time in as many days, I was pulled from my body and flew through an infinite void. Just as suddenly I snapped back to reality- floating through the air in a lovely sitting room full of sunlight and bright green plants. As I fell I realized Sean and- _was that Hermione-_ were staring at me in shock. Another of those visions he was triggering, and at the worst possible time. “Sean send me back!” I stammered, “I can’t be unconscious send me back right now!” Just as suddenly I was yanked back, away from all of that. And not in the direction of my body.

I flew through the void _again_ but this time there was something else with me. It pulsed and it glowed in this place where light didn’t exist- somehow it _was_ blue. The _Concept_ of blue. I couldn’t see, but I could _sense_ in some way I couldn’t define, and it was _vast_ and growing bigger. It was a weed that spanned universes- it was a many-tentacled _thing_ and there was nothing outside its grasp. It pulled me back from Sean with one of those tendrils. It didn’t have words yet but I knew what it was thinking. _You don’t get to escape me that easily._

I didn’t have a lot of defiance left in me. I’d spent the last month running against my own instincts, trying to drag the world to salvation instead of lifting it up because, I felt, the needs were so urgent. My husband was dead and lost in a distant narrative. I’d broken faith with friends, even if unintentionally. I’d blundered in my wishing and opened my home to invasion, then become stuck and unable to defend it in an unrelentingly hostile game world. Now my body was broken in three different ways and likely dying. And the worst of it was, ever since Aslan there had been nothing to push back _against_. I’d been lost. I’d just been- _surviving._ Raging against the slow dying of my world. Secretly despairing that it could ever be saved.

But this, _this_ , crystallized something for me. I had suspected but now I had _proof._ It wasn’t just a fluke of infomorph disease or an accident of the cataclysm that the Concept had come for us. There was an _intentionality_ behind this latest disaster, on some level. A consciousness. It _wanted_ what was happening. And now I knew that it existed- had baited it out? Wait, had I planned- In whatever in-between space I was in, free of Fallout’s restrictive ruleset, _another_ version of me smiled as wide as she ever had, and for some reason I could _hear her thoughts_. “Well, there’s the reveal. Time to turn the tables. Haley alpha, permission granted.” And a series of blocked memories _clicked_ back into place. I echoed her grin, leering at the monstrosity. “Oh, you just made the biggest mistake of your brief existence.”

It radiated contempt and curiosity. _What could I possibly have done wrong? You’re as good as dead. With you gone, your world’s resistance is effectively ended,_ it seemed to suggest.

I grinned even wider and every inch of my teeth in that not-space gleamed and came to a point. Draconic, in my self-conception. “Untrue. I know something you don’t know.” 

I had lived with my husband long enough to know when someone was rolling their eyes at me, even if I couldn’t see them in person. _You know nothing that would help you here._

I shook my head. “Someone once told me I couldn’t be in two places at once. It turns out I enjoy a challenge. You have _no idea_ what the other version of me has been up to. And you just gave us someone to _fight_.”

\----

Haley

1 day ago, immediately after the One Ring incident

\----

I was pacing- I _knew_ there was something wrong. I could _feel_ it. Roy wanted me to build a weapon capable of stopping myself on a rampage. _I_ wanted that. Why hadn’t I already thought of it? What had I been doing, this last month? Also, my simulacra had been fully prepared to take me on- far _too_ prepared, in far too little time. Had I already set something up, already given them autonomy and just forgotten it? I didn’t have any way to assess my memories, but I knew there were gaps- the sensation just kept nagging at me. Stressed, I reached into my pocket and my hand brushed against that _thing_ I kept there and couldn’t think about- and then I was in another world.

Three Haleys were sitting around a campaign table in an open field surrounded by machinery when I popped into existence. They looked up, startled. The one nearest to me sighed. “Damn it, it’s happening faster and faster. We’re too smart for our own good, ladies.” The others chuckled.

Personally I was _not_ amused. I crossed my arms. “What the eff is going on? Is this some secret plan? Did I _actually_ have a secret plan?”

They rolled their eyes but the one nearest to me spoke. “Of _course_ it’s a secret plan, dummy. You started making secret plans the second the tower fell. We probably have a dozen of these and none of us know the full extent. This is the one that _matters_ though. I’ll give you a hint- _Bilocation_.”

The spell flashed to my mind. High level, better than _Simulacra_ , but- “We can’t be bilocated. That spell makes a perfect copy of the user and each one experiences everything the other one does. I’d remember that. I’d be seeing through your eyes even if you didn’t want me to. And it doesn’t last long enough. Or have any range!”

She shrugged. “Well we got too big for simulacra, and the… _other_ plans haven’t borne out yet. This plane is timeless with respect to magic- it’ll last forever in here. And we’re always close, as long as you keep that ring in your pocket.” I started and reached down- sure enough, her finger was waggling from the ring-gate in there. The very thing I’d touched to get pulled in here. “We put you under a _Geas_ not to think about that, or the half of your incoming perception stream that was on my end, unless given permission. Then we erased the memories of the spell. _Bilocation_ means we both felt the compulsive effects of course, but it was easy enough for the other Haleys to fill me in and ‘Permit’ me to think about it once you were gone.”

I wasn’t angry but I _was_ a little bewildered. “But… why?”

She smiled sympathetically. “We needed to be in two places at once. You needed to keep on saving the world. I _couldn’t_ let myself let that ball drop. We also needed to bait out the next story twist while we still had a hidden Uno Reverse card to play. But you also needed to be in here, preparing for the next step, the one that will lift humanity out of this mess. So… we split. Don’t think we abandoned you. I’ve seen everything you’ve seen, felt everything you’ve felt. I mean, I’m literally _you_ , neither of us is a clone. I know how hard it’s been. But we needed the front, while we gathered new resources. And the kill switch, if something went wrong. I just have to take off this portal and we’re back in one body, spell ended. We almost pulled the plug when you got the One Ring just now. ”

I sulked. “You could have let me know.”

She sighed. “It was too risky- we’re still not ready to go live in here. We have the golems and some deeper contingencies but we don’t want to use Aslan’s men as the first test subjects. And If you were compromised and you remembered, you might end the connection from your end. Also, it turns out we’re terrible liars. We decided all of this mutually, though you don’t remember right now. Until today, not even the rest of the Simulacra knew what we were up to, though we’re pulling them in now that you’ve turned them all loose. I don’t want this place vulnerable to the Efreet, and I don’t want to disclose it until it’s ready. We’re operating in just double time now, we don’t have tremendously accelerated speed advantages.”

That reminded me. “Roy wants a weapon to use against me- _us-_ if I lose my mind. Does this count?”

She waved her hand in a _sorta_ motion. “Right now we need test candidates, people to trial run the first generation of heroes. We’ll give you another gate to pass to Roy. Hopefully he’ll give it to someone suitable. But you’re going to forget you were in here, again. Just remember this, when you do get these memories back- even when you’re all by yourself, you are _not_ alone. You contain multitudes.”

\----

I plummeted back into my body and awoke with a gasp that did no good- there was no oxygen left. Still human here, at least physically- but some portion of me was coming back to itself. The Concept still existed in my mind, but- it wasn’t winning, anymore. It might even be on the retreat. I couldn’t access other Haley in my mind due to Fallout’s block on my magic, but apparently her ring and connection were still in place because I had permission to _think_ about her now, at least. But it wasn’t the time. The first deathclaw was down the stairs- had I lost any time at all? Seconds, at most. I raised the rifle and dropped into that strange time-shifted firing stance. I placed as many shots as I could, directly into that helmet. If they had to be constantly controlled, there was always a chance- _yes-_ my shots struck true and it roared as the leash was slipped, so loud it was nearly deafening, and turned to fight the nearest living things- its brothers, thankfully.

That was death in the next ten seconds averted. But what about death in the next _thirty_? My vision really was greying at the edges, and I knew I probably hadn’t taken any oxygen in forty seconds or more. I whipped the helmet out of my magic inventory space. _No power, but surely-_ yes, the breathing system was some kind of pressurized tank fed by an air recycler. I jammed the laser rifle into the helmet and shot the cap off the tank, ruining it but letting out a blast of good air- I stuffed my head into it and took a deep breath. Okay, death staved off for at least sixty more seconds. We were making progress!

I finally had breathing room, so to speak, and I glanced around the room before almost losing my final breath in astonishment. _He didn’t_. Oh, he couldn’t have. In only a few days, on an unfamiliar world? But he had. This was what he’d worked so hard to guard. Here in the basement of this vault city, he’d built one of his projectors. _Asriel you mad bastard genius._ The original, as I recalled from Golden Compass, had required the severing of a child’s soul to power it- _this_ one, it appeared, was running off a nuke-pack. _At least you had some sense there_. But the power source was secondary- the truly alarming thing was the _effect_. The projectors were designed to punch holes between worlds. _This is key to the Concept’s plan. It’s not aiming for any one world- it wants_ all _of them_. I shuddered in horror and ran to it- he’d wired a local terminal to it, and it was asking for a password.

There was no time to hack. I only had one guess, anyway. I entered it. _Silvertongue_.

The apparatus _clanged_ and spun to life. _Thank you, Asriel._ Shimmering curtains of light filled the air- it was like the aurora borealis sprang into being in that tunnel- I couldn’t help but make the joke. “At this time of day, in this part of the country? Localized _entirely_ within this vault?” I chuckled. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Haley. Crack jokes on the side with oxygen.” The portal shimmered into being. I fired some shots at the deathclaws to get their attention and before they could extricate themselves from their furball, or anyone could choke to death, threw myself through it, praying for one thing- _please don’t be another video game world_.

It wasn’t. It was night, wherever it was, and I didn’t have time to take in the surroundings. As I crossed the threshold my world _lurched_ once again and all the cruft of Fallout’s rules and restrictions dropped away. Oh! Oh I’d _missed_ the feeling of armor and muscle, of magic at my fingertips. And there she was, my also-me, right inside my head. The Deathclaws pelted out right behind me, but they weren’t dealing with a broken human with a shitty flashlight anymore. I stared _down_ at them from my _real_ body, restored at last, more than a match for any deathclaw. “Hello boys. Just between us murder-lizards I’m really _not_ sorry about what I’m going to do to you.” Too many lives at stake to find some way of sparing these horrors even if I’d wanted to- I unleashed my first fire breath in days and oh it felt _good_. They didn’t stand a chance.

I didn’t waste any time as they fell, charred and smoking, to the ground. Other-me was nagging me about the brutality of that but I shunted it aside- _That doesn’t count as sentient murder damn it, they were basically rabid attack dogs._ Taking another huge breath I darted back into the portal- with another _lurch_ I was back on Fallout rules, ignoring the ache of my wounds to race up through the concrete tunnel to the Overseer’s terminal. It couldn’t have been _much_ more than three or four minutes, I fervently hoped- long enough that everyone in here should be unconscious, not so long that they’d all be dead or suffering brain damage, but this was a crude methodology at best. I stabbed at the terminal with shaky fingers and set the oxygen back to normal levels, and _finally_ allowed myself to relax.

Spending some minutes at the console to disable the robots and display terminals throughout the vault, I walked unsteadily back out of the Overseer’s office. That had been… _entirely_ too close. I was hurt, pretty badly. Cut and bruised and burnt. But I felt good. Whole, for the first time in a month. I grabbed the sabotaged helmet off the unconscious form of the armored man in the hall- he _was_ breathing, I noted- and tested the radio. Clearer, now that the broadcasts and automation had cut out. “Roy, can you hear me?”

He came back immediately, sounding stressed beyond belief. “Haley, what’s going _on_ in there? Telantes came back and said you made it in but it’s been nearly two hours and a minute ago Mac got _really_ wild in the back compartment, I had to go in and sit on him to keep him from hurting himself.”

I sighed but it wasn’t weary, anymore- “This was a win. This was a pivot. We’re not just reacting anymore, Roy. There’s an enemy now, and we know who and what it is, and we might even be ready for it. Even if I don’t quite know how to fight it. Bring the APC around to the front but don’t get out, the situation isn’t quite secure yet.”

The doctor was already getting busy, I thought, as I saw a crew of bleary but _un_ -zombified people moving outwards from his office, getting mentats into the mouths of every unconscious vault dweller before waking them in turn. I took the helmet off and stepped lightly around their forms. Hopefully they’d get everyone before the Concepters woke up.

“When you said to get an oxygen rig set up, I thought you might have something like that in mind” he said, as I strolled into his office. “Effective, and hopefully not deadly. Thank you. I- wow, you’re really banged up.” He looked me in the eye and appeared startled by what he saw. “It’s got you too, doesn’t it.”

I nodded. “It does, but not for long.” It didn’t seem able to get a grip on me now- it was like knowing that my purpose was to stand in opposition to it was helping me to resist. It was still there, but it was like a nagging tune in the back of my mind instead of a full-throated roar. Still- “I’m going to need as many of those pills as you can give me.” Best not to take chances, if magic couldn’t reverse this.

Some hours later, we finished. The doctor tended my wounds while our last teammate was brought out of his Concept-induced zombiehood, and we shared a hug and a few tearful moments. Roy worked with Mac and the vault dwellers to break down Asriel’s projector and pack it into the APC. It had been built to be man-portable- setup would take minutes at most. Literally all of us were infected, so further meme exposure wasn’t a tremendous concern in the short run, but the dwellers were carefully scrubbing every inch of their computer systems and any out-of-the-way places where the meme had been scrawled. The doctor assured us they could run on mentats for ages, and I assured _him_ that we’d be back with a more permanent solution just as soon as I found one. While he checked the other two over for wounds, Roy, Telantes and I settled down to discuss next steps.

“The way I see it we have a major problem,” I said to them as we sat around a table in one of the vault restaurants. “The Concept is obviously going to spread like wildfire, if this world is any indication. Anywhere we aren’t present to check it, we can assume it’s going to be ascendant. That includes _our_ world, most likely. We need to find a way to reverse the infection, or inoculate against it, to stop the spread in the short term and roll it back long term.”

Roy looked pensive. “How do you stop an idea, though? You can’t stop people thinking it.”

I nodded. “You _can_ , if you can change their _minds_. _Heal_ spells aren’t going to work but I have a wand that can cast _Modify Memory_. Apparently,” I grimaced, “I’ve been making regular use of it. If we simply replaced the portions where people remember seeing the meme with memories of them, I don’t know, doing taxes or something-”

Telantes spoke up. “If they can’t remember it, it can’t take them!”

“Yes, exactly.” The others perked up at this positive news and I felt compelled to moderate it with a bit of caution. “Well, unless they see it again. But it’s a start. Now, the problem is that _Modify Memory_ only does five minutes at a time, and takes as long to cast as it took to form the initial memories. It’s meant to overwrite conversations, in game terms, I think. Not to wipe whole days. So the _principle_ is sound but the _scale_ is all wrong. As a backup plan we might be able to stack multiple wand casts at once. However, there’s another source that I know of. One that’s really alarmingly good at altering memories.”

Telantes jumped up and down. “Ooh ooh! Are we going to the river Lethe?” Then he paused, puzzled. “Do we even know any narrators who could get us to Hades?”

I smiled. “No but that might be a bit _too_ extreme- I’m pretty sure the waters of the Lethe destroy _all_ memory, which would cause a lot of additional issues. But Harry Potter has a spell that can change-”

Roy was unable to contain himself. “Holy shit, this is all blowing my mind. You’re suggesting that spell is _real_ and we can go find someone to _cast it?_ ” He fell back against the decidedly uncomfortable cushions of the APC.

I laughed- “Not just anyone. It’s time to do what I should have done a month ago, and go find my wayward husband. Asriel just handed us the perfect way to do it. Let’s get back to the real world and take full advantage- I don’t want _either_ side of the portal we open to be set in Fallout. There’s just one thing that’s nagging at me,” I said, turning to Telantes. “How is it that he, and apparently Merlin and even the Concept itself, knew about me? The me that isn’t just from some old romance novel?” I might have been a big deal but I wasn’t _world news_ just yet.

“Oh, that’s easy” said Telantes, happy to be of assistance. “The night the Concept got us, one of your teams with one of your clones ran across us. She’s working with them, now.”

_I’m doing_ ** _what?_** _That_ sure wasn’t part of my restored memories. They knew about the Efreets then. They had _access_ to the efreets, clone-me could summon them. But how on earth had they convinced even a weeks-old copy of me to- I shook my head. Questions for later. That explained Jada’s recent gambit, and a few other things. But at least the Efreets and hopefully the corrupted Simulacra didn’t know about the rest of me, tucked away in some kind of character-generator dimension. I closed my eyes- this couldn’t inspire the deep despair that it might have, an hour ago. “Okay. One more thing to deal with. In the meantime- let’s get out of Fallout. I need to send some reinforcements back here, reunite with my other half, and then go to Hogwarts and get my _other_ other half.”


	42. Chapter 42

\----

Sean, Hogwarts

Minutes after the narrative disruption

\----

I stood in Dumbledore’s office. He was with Madame Pomfrey, no doubt coping with the loss of a student and a Dark Arts professor. Hermione stood outside- she was desperate to know what was going on, but I couldn’t be the one to tell her about her classmate’s death. Had they even had time to grow close enough that they could be called friends? I tried not to think about it. _Somewhere out there is a new narrator and I have no idea where the story of this world is going now._ Would they show up soon? What would they want? How did one pick up a dropped fanfiction that, to my knowledge, was never published? The gizmos and gadgets scattered around the headmaster’s office whirred and chirped quietly. I tried to ignore my racing mind.

When Dumbledore finally swept in, Hermione in tow and in tears, he looked exhausted. He took the chair behind his desk with three long strides and collapsed into it, looking utterly deflated. “I have relayed to Ms. Granger the circumstances of her friend’s death. For her sake and mine, Mr. Peakes, I hope you can elaborate on them.” There was a hard edge to his voice, and I bristled at it.

“I can. Do you really want me to? _Really_? Not everything I say is going to cast you in a good light, Dumbledore.”

He leaned forward and placed both hands on his desk, no wand in evidence. “Miss Granger, can you agree that nothing said here will leave this room? Sean has… information, that we must keep in strictest confidence.” She nodded, still sniffling. I really wanted to comfort her but- did I have any right to?

I refocused on my anger. “The short version is that Voldemort was alive, he was living in the back of Quirrel’s head, and he attacked me. I _knew_ he was there and I’d have _told_ you but-”

He held up a hand. “He was there in the original story, and things worked out. What caused the narrative shift?” Hermione was whipping her head back and forth between us, eyes wide.

_I did_. I couldn’t say it. “He- I’m surmising that the plot that was _supposed_ to happen was that he captured me, and Draco rescued me, and probably something like his love for me shielded me from Quirrel’s touch at the end of the year and that was how I knew it was real. The story was ridiculous, Albus. It was a school romance written by a teenage girl who didn’t have the first clue how people operate! I couldn’t follow through with it.”

He looked at me evenly but I felt something in that gaze. “I told you once, when you came here, to consider what happens when a man who is not the main character arrives and begins to upset the balance with foreknowledge. _Have_ you considered?”

He was _threatening_ me. I hissed at him, “I recall you _also_ told me not to get involved with the students, _jackass_. Which I was working _very_ hard to do when the arch-nemesis _you_ let sneak into your school by _hiding under a turban_ fired a death beam at the man that _you_ emotionally compromised, and Harry threw himself in the way because they were beginning an affair that _you were perfectly aware of._ The way you run this place-”

“STOP IT!” Shouted Hermione, standing between us. “Just… stop it. You’re _both_ awful. How can you fight like this? He’s- he’s _dead_ and you’re in here attacking each other! He’d be ashamed of both of you!”

She was right, goddamn it. I could see that Dumbledore felt it too. “Miss Granger, I apologize. You are absolutely correct. Now is not the time to apportion blame- we must survive the days to come, first. Sean…” he regarded me, and I stared right back at him. “I cannot apologize for my actions, to you. Can you find it in you to work with me anyway?”

I really wasn’t sure I could. “You suspect, as I do, that I am your new best hope against whatever’s to come. The fact that you are even _asking_ means you probably have some idea already of what the twist is. But I learned magic without you. I learned the _secret_ without you. I am not entirely convinced that accepting your… _assistance_ … will get me anything other than _manipulated_. I want to _understand_ you, Albus. I want to believe you are working in the best interests of the world. Convince me.”

He sighed. “You have learned _a_ secret, and a powerful one it is. Do you suppose it is the only one?” Hmm, a fair point, but if he thought I was going to take a _bribe-_ “I think it would be easiest to explain to you. How much do you know of the history of Tom Riddle, of Grindelwald, of Atlantis?”

“In order- more than _you_ do, I’ve had an overview, and nothing except fan theories,” I answered, still feeling fairly hostile to all of this.

He nodded. “Let us begin with the third, then. The standard history holds that ten thousand years ago, magic was wild and potent. Wizards stalked the earth as gods, shaping both the land and the non-magical as they pleased. We know very little of this time, except for scattered scraps. What was known as Atlantis might have been a city but more likely it was a world, or a _universe_. It does not matter- it was shattered, in a magical apocalypse. This world we inhabit now is the lifeboat, all knowledge of that time erased save for rumor and conjecture.” Standard stuff so far, I made a hand gesture for him to get on with it at which he chuckled. “Yes, a cut and dry backstory. I thought so myself- which is why I went digging, in my youth. Long after Atlantis, four wizards were able to come together and raise this castle, a feat that all of Magical Britain could not replicate today. The merest cobblestone from that time can grant life eternal. This wand,” he gestured at what I knew to be the Elder Wand, “a relic of the _descendants_ of Atlantis, is one of the most powerful weapons in existence.”

He turned and looked out the great glass window at the back of the office, avoiding our eyes. “We ran off the edge of the map, Grindelwald and I. I wonder now if we wandered into areas that the originator of our story had never considered. Areas left muddled enough for something… _else_ to take hold. Something _other_. It called itself the Coordinator.” I felt my blood turn to ice. _No. The thing from the phone call?_ “It spoke as though it was part of a collective, something from outside space and time. We guessed that they were Atlanteans- it certainly allowed us to believe that.” _We thought it was an alien or something._ “It told us that our world _was_ the disaster. That Atlantis had leaked away, through the cracks between dimensions- that it wasn’t in our past, that it was our _present_ , an alternate version that could never be, now. That there was no reversing the loss of magic, but we could save what was left.”

I knew where this was going. “It told you that the entropy was coming from certain people, that you needed to kill them to stop the drain,” I said, with a voice like lead.

He turned toward me, eyebrow raised. “Yes. It taught us magic, secrets like the one you seem to have discovered quite on your own, and it told us we would need to eliminate the people whose stories were draining magic from our world. Though I didn’t do what it asked, I never questioned the truth of its assertions when I was younger. I found the notion of mass murder abhorrent, didn’t trust the creature I was speaking to, even after we performed many tests and verified the truth of what it claimed- that magic was diminishing, gradually. Grindelwad thought my sentiment was foolish.”

_There are things beyond our stories, you know. You don’t want to know what happens when_ they _get involved_. Randall Flagg had said that to me, back in Wonderland. I’d seen it for myself on my journey between worlds. He’d also said they had _eaten God_. I was starting to worry that he’d meant that very, very literally. I finished Dumbledore’s thought. “Grindelwald worked for it, took power from it. Whatever his other motivations, he was ultimately working for that _thing_. Spreading death.”

He nodded. “You’ve encountered something similar. What choice did you make? And what did it offer?”

That was true, but- “In my version it told us that the narrators were _summoning_ magic, and chaos, into our world. That the rise of strange magic systems was due to the cracks in the world caused by our recent catastrophe, that we would need to kill them to stop it. It implied that it had granted the powers that my wife recently acquired. But she turned it down- refused to kill them.” _And then Flagg killed me. To piss her off, force her to forget that?_ “There’s a greater game being played here.”

Dumbledore sat back in his chair. “She is a true hero then. If you live long enough you will learn one thing- there is _always_ a greater game being played. Wheels within wheels. One being, seeing both sides of a dimensional divide-”

I gasped. “It might not even have been _lying_. If it really was trying to seal off the transfer of entropy between worlds, it might have looked like that. But why murder? What would it gain by the death of so many? And why would it be trying to force a false equilibrium with high magical entropy in some worlds and low in others?” I was starting to see the shape of something but I couldn’t tell what it was, yet.

Dumbledore didn’t seem to know either. “Regardless- those were the powers, and the instructions, that it left with my companion. And later, I suspect, with Tom Riddle. To rid the world of these narrative leaks became their grand crusade. In opposing them I learned many of their secrets, but not all. Never all.” He was staring into the distance again. The man did “Haunted by the Ghosts of His Past” better than anyone I’d ever met, that was for sure. He continued. “Hogwarts was founded by people who had touched the same entity that I had. Their solution, and the path I chose to continue, was to limit the use of magic. To restrict it through limited education- in the vain hope that a limited society would not produce killers capable of ending all muggle life, and in turn might use up our draining reserves of magic at a more sedate pace. That is the role of Hogwarts, and my sin as a teacher. It is a bastion of ignorance to save a dying planet.”

Hermione was growing increasingly frustrated. “Normally I’d be furious that you weren’t educating me, but what does _any_ of this have to do with Harry being killed? Are there other students in danger? Why did the world skip a beat, and why was Sean right next to me when it started up again?” She just wouldn’t be deterred. I glanced at Dumbledore and he nodded.

I supposed it was my turn to explain, if I could. I tried to tell her about the nature of stories and the world she was living in. It wasn’t easy going, but she grasped the principles quickly enough. Eventually it came time for my own confession. “I came from outside your story, to learn magic. I had a disagreement with your narrator, and I pushed her too far. She left, and your world almost came to an end. But you got a _new_ narrator, somehow, and I don’t understand who or why. Dumbledore, have you seen her? You seem to think she’s a threat.”

\----

The doddering old professor gestured towards a mirror which was resolving into an image. A girl no older than Hermione was walking up the path from Hogsmeade. Her eyes were sparkling in the evening gloom- almost glowing. No, they _were_ glowing. “She just arrived. Already she’s taken most of the town.”

“Taken?” Sean asked, but then he saw- behind her, the villagers of Hogsmeade shuffled out of the gloom. Their eyes were glowing as well. The shuffling gait, the vacant stares- they triggered recognition for him. “She’s… a zombie? _The new narrator is a zombie?_ ” How was that even possible, he wondered? Outside, Gretchen giggled to herself.

“Yes, memetic, I believe. Some kind of image that spreads but does not completely incapacitate.” Said Dumbledore, still watching the mirror, practically lost in thought. “In particular it doesn’t seem to impede their magic- not entirely. I suspect that they’ve already apparated new vectors to every magical town and city. Hogwarts is, of course, warded against such things.”

I glanced at Hermione who also seemed a bit puzzled by how calm he was being. She decided to broach the subject. “Uh, professor? You’re taking all of this very well. Do you have a plan?”

“Hmm?” He said, then seemed to realize we were still there. “Oh, no, not well at all. Quite upset.”

\----

_Wait a minute._ “You were sharp as a tack right up until you started talking about her. If she’s your new narrator… she’s got some influence on your behavior. Is she actively describing you as easily distracted and prone to long-winded reminiscence when it suits her? _Has she been stalling me for time?_ ”

\----

Dumbledore smiled apologetically at the silly, scared boy. “That seems like a _distinct_ possibility, Mr. Peakes. I’m afraid you may be quite on your own on this one. I’ll resist where I can, but even for a trained Legilimens it’s difficult to know when one’s mind is not entirely under one’s own control, especially when the thoughts run down pathways that-” but the boy wasn’t listening anymore. He bolted for the door, shouting to Hermione as he passed.

“Try to get him to set up wards against memetic images! If _anything_ distracts you from that, you’ve got to fight it! Can you do that?” But Hermione was just a sad little girl, not even out of her first year. How was _she_ going to-

\----

I saw her wavering and I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Hermione. Whatever she’s saying about you, I don’t think she can make you entirely untrue to your character, and _you_ are the most reliable person in this school. In another world, in a different set of circumstances, you were the greatest witch of your generation. You still have that within you. I don’t need you to save the world tonight- just keep _him_ on task.” Her back straightened and she nodded. I patted her once and smiled, then took off. Hopefully if they were out of frame for me, they’d be harder to screw with for my counterpart.

A duel of narratives seemed to be in the works. For some reason the girl outside wanted to give this world over to a meme. I reviewed my options as I raced through the corridors. _Magic, can you block an image in whole or in part? Practice on the house crests- if I look at Hufflepuff I want to see, I don’t know, a smiley face._ I felt it doing something with my eyes- this was extremely risky but I felt like I was out of time. There’d be consequences later, no doubt, but what choice did I have? I put it out of my mind- or maybe it was put out of my mind quite literally.

Seconds later I glanced at an armored suit as I ran and stopped- _wait, why did someone engrave a smiley face on the-_ I reached out to touch it. It _felt_ real. _Was this always here? Did I-_ I must have done something anti-memetic as a test. _And I can’t remember what might even have been there before. Can’t even_ think _about it. I hope it wasn’t important. Okay, Magic, whatever you did- do it again when you see the images those zombies are going to throw at us._ I raced onto the training grounds and grabbed a broom, heading for the Forbidden Forest.

\----

The wards weren’t tuned to stop ordinary people from Hogsmeade coming to the castle, or even to stop most spellcasting, not without activation. Gretchen was able to walk right onto the grounds without any problems- until the first of the Hogwarts professors arrived. Professor Sprout swept down on a broom, dropping entangling vines, immature mandrakes, and other non-lethal contraptions on the crowd. Professors Snape and McGonagall rode right behind her, throwing potions and transfiguring traps- anything to slow the crowd without killing them.

Gretchen knew that was silly. The crowd were _happy_ to die, if it meant spreading the Concept. They would walk right through fire- how could half-hearted defenses stand up against that kind of determination? And while the professors battled in ones and twos, the Concept could fight as a collective. All around the crowd, wands joined together and huge flickering pictures sprang up- the image of the Concept were practically _alive_ in the magic of this world, changing and morphing as rapidly as it shifted in the minds of its casters. Gretchen stared at it- it was so beautiful! Mcgonagall and Pomfrey looked directly at the pictures and were so stunned by how fascinating they were that they fell lifelessly from their brooms but were caught by waiting wands below. Snape had a more suspicious nature, and shielded his eyes when he saw the other two fall, retreating back the way he had come. It didn’t matter- the Concept was spreading out, covering the whole world. He’d see it eventually.

They were well and truly on the grounds of the castle now. It would not be possible to apparate, but the Concept had more than enough people to cover every inch of the halls and rooms of Hogwarts. At the towering front doors stood a frail old man in white wizard’s robes, with a young girl right behind him. Dumbledore was coming to the defense of his school. He saw Gretchen in the lead and tried to meet her eyes, but she was cleverer than that and wouldn’t meet his gaze. He began to blather, as if it would do any good. “You come to take our world, then- but you use the minds and bodies of our friends and families. You think that they will work with you towards that purpose, but you are wrong. This is not the sort of story that ends well for you.”

Gretchen grinned with delight. She hadn’t even been here a day and already Dumbledore was _acknowledging_ her! The parts of her that weren’t fully focused on the Concept were excited about that, though she couldn’t remember why. She knew she needed to respond, though. “Nothing has to end here. I always _wanted_ to come to Hogwarts, why do we have to fight about it? We have something to show you and then things can go on the way they always have, if you want. You probably won’t want that though. I know I didn’t.”

He shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, young lady. My words weren’t addressed to you.” What a crazy old man! There was nobody here but Gretchen. Just Gretchen and the Concept, forever and ever. Wait- the Concept- she shook her head, momentarily puzzled. No, it wasn’t _alive_. It was just an idea. A wonderful, perfect idea that needed to be shared with everyone everywhere! She waved her hand and the crowd began placing their wands together to project those beautiful images in every direction.

But there was a horn, from the direction of the forest. What- she hadn’t said that would happen! It was that boy, the one with Dumbledore earlier. Who _was_ he? He wasn’t part of the books that Gretchen remembered. He was certainly no Harry Potter. But here he came riding with… _centaurs and spiders?_ Was he telling stories too?!?

\----

“Thank you, Firenze- remember, incapacitate but don’t kill if you can help it.” The centaur nodded and I leapt from his back, letting my magic catch me as I got the broom back under myself. We’d only encountered one another briefly in the forest, but I’d made sure to respect his territory _and_ that of Aragog the giant spider. Some hasty bargains tonight had helped secure their aid against this existential threat. As they charged I watched the crowd attempt to project those illusions a second time, only to see them fizzle. _Hermione did it then, she got him focused on warding the place_.

I swept low over the charge and felt rather than saw Snape and Flitwick forming up alongside me. I was running low, exhausted after such a long day. But my magic was a fine thing, always ready to do her part and I leaned into her now. We made a sweeping low pass, dropping stunners and flashbang spells as we went, breaking the line for the charge of the centaurs and spiders while dodging return fire of every description. The back of my broom took a glancing hit and caught fire- I slapped it out and winced as I burned my hand. Flitwick went down but I saw Dumbledore recovering him to the castle battlements even as he dueled with a dozen wizards simultaneously, flattening them one after another with nonlethal spells. I longed to watch him work- _needed_ to be down there, to learn what he knew.

The charge of centaur and spider alike broke over the wizards like a wave and they began to fall back in good order- those that weren’t simply slapped unconscious then and there. I shouted to Snape over the rushing wind- “Obliviate the ones we capture! Strip the memory of tonight out of them and they might be alright!” He nodded and peeled off to relay the word while I deflected shots that were tracing up after him. Finally my eyes settled on the target I had been looking for. The girl with the glowing eyes wasn’t quite at the front anymore- I swooped down and leapt off the broom at her.

\----

The annoying boy landed right in front of her and shot her a grin. “Well you made me play the centaur card so congrats for that. But this ends here.” He deflected a stunner from someone in her crowd and fired one of his own back, barely even moving his wand- he was as fast as Dumbledore! He didn’t even give her time to talk, firing a wide array of spells so quickly that she had to drop to the ground and roll just to avoid them. This wasn’t right, she definitely wasn’t telling him to do any of this!

But it was okay, she had her own tricks- she knew _all_ the best wizards in the world from the books and she’d already picked up several of them for her bodyguard. A man stepped up to shield her and his wand moved even faster than the boy’s- he had a wooden leg and a prosthetic eye swivelling madly to see everything at once. The boy looked alarmed- “That can’t possibly be-” but it was, and Mad Eye Moody began an attack so furious that he was thrown off his feet and blown backwards. Her _other_ protector stepped up and put a hand on her shoulders. He hadn’t been touched as heavily by the Concept as most of the others, and could still speak. “We’re going to have to fall back if we want to keep you safe,” said Grindelwald. “We can’t spread the Concept here, we will have to starve them out.”

“ _No!”_ Said Gretchen, furious that she might have to wait to get into Hogwarts _again_. “I won’t let him keep me out! Moody! Put it in his mind directly!” The wild-eyed man grinned, taking her meaning, and turned back to his extremely short-lived duel. _This will all be over soon,_ she thought.

\----

I couldn’t possibly fight Moody. This wasn’t even Barty Crouch _playing_ at being Moody, it was the real deal, and he was lethal. All my speed in spellcasting was no match for his experience and trickery. I abandoned any attempt to reach the girl and focused on survival- even that was a losing game, and within seconds I was in full flight backwards as he pursued. Lucky for me, the zomboid crowd was going in the opposite direction, clearing the gates and pulling back to the far edge of the grounds, so I was able to cross into the no-man’s land between the warring armies before he finally got me. It was a false memory charm, and the memory was simple- the spell earlier with the memetic illusion had _worked,_ and suddenly I remembered in great clarity and detail the image it had projected. He grinned nastily and swept away as I fell to my knees. _So much for my antimemetic inoculation_.

The image was indescribable and overwhelming. I couldn’t _not_ think about it. It was occupying every corner of my mind and it was all I could do to stay conscious. I struggled against it, looking around the battlefield. Seeing that memory charms worked, the zombies had stopped falling back. The centaur charge had disrupted them but wizards were tough, and lethal. The horse-men and spiders were being killed or driven off swiftly now. The tide was turning back, the pressure towards the gates resuming. 

The part of my mind not consumed by the Concept was still racing. _I need an epiphany, or a rescue. Something of my own making. But what?_ All I had made of this world was a mess, I thought as I watched Dumbledore encounter Grindelwald at the castle gates. His old friend and greatest nemesis. I kept trying to understand the nature of our worlds from an analytical perspective, keeping myself removed from these people. I _could_ have been doing my job of learning magic while finding some way to help Harry and discourage Draco that didn’t involve outright shunning them until it was too late. _Save the people around you, save the world_. My wife’s words rang in my head, battling with the blue. I wished I’d understood what she meant by that earlier.

Someone was nearby. I looked blearily, through blue-tinged eyes. Snape. What was he- no, I recognized that spell. He had a grim cast to his face and he was summoning _Fiendfyre_. “No,” I croaked, trying to get his attention. I half crawled, half stumbled, until I was clutching his robes. “No,” I said again. Everything was blue. It was all blue. But this wasn’t blue speaking, it was the last vestiges of Sean- I couldn’t let him do this.

“There’s no choice, Peakes!” He shouted, as the spark came to life in his hands. “We can’t spare their lives- we have to defend the students.” He said, more softly- “We failed.”

“No,” I got out a third time. I summoned everything left in me that wasn’t already thinking of the Concept and tried to express one final thought. “They’re not dead. There’s still hope while they’re not dead. Mercy. Mercy.” _Give them another chance. Even if it kills us._ I saw in his eyes that he understood, and then I collapsed to the dirt at his feet.

\----

She saw the boy fall at the feet of Professor Snape, and then a flash- _two_ flashes. What was going on over there? A burst of fire and light, and then there was a glorious bird riding on his shoulder, made of flame and joy- _a phoenix?_ She seethed with jealousy, and then anger when a _second_ burst of fire happened and the bird and the boy both vanished.

Then Snape snarled, and thrust his wand skywards- the newborn _Fiendfyre_ he’d been summoning _whooshed_ up in a column of deadly flame into the air, where- what on earth was _that?_ Gretchen was completely lost, now. She was certain she wasn’t narrating _any_ of this. The deadly flames disappeared into a hole in the sky! And out of that hole flew-

“Whatever _that_ stuff was, I’m glad I’m immune to it. Was that fiendfyre?” Rumbled the great golden dragon, winging its way down to the battlefield as even the wizards of the Concept looked on in awe. It was the size of a battleship- _hundreds_ of feet long, and it had some kind of _harness_ wrapped around it- enough rigging for a hundred men to ride comfortable. Instead, strapped in at the top was a single man in full plate armor, wielding a hammer and glowing with some kind of holy aura.

The dragon thudded to earth in a shower of dirt, knocking half the combatants off their feet and dragging the whole battle to a halt. Then it _spoke_ in a remarkably pleasant voice. “Uh, hello everyone, looks like you’ve all been having zombie issues as well. Has anyone seen my husband?”

Things fell apart rather rapidly, after that.

\----

I woke up in a bed in the infirmary with Fawkes the phoenix, Dumbledore and my wife leaning over me. I’d been restored to my adult form, at some point. Behind them stood- it looked like some caricature of a Paladin, an absolute beef tank in overly elaborate platemail with a giant hammer. He looked like he felt as awkward about this as I did.  “Okay, guess I’m dead then,” I muttered. “Glad my next afterlife’s going to include you though,” I said to my wife. She smiled but I saw the tears in her eyes as she leaned down to hug me. She still had that absurd strength going for her, I noted blearily as my bones creaked.

“I’m glad to see you too, you _idiot_. What is it with you and trying to get yourself killed during climactic moments? I’m so mad at you, _god_ I love you.” She laughed and I smiled weakly in apology at Dumbledore. _Wives, right?_ He shook his head in polite bewilderment. _Oh yeah, confirmed bachelor_.

With her present in the world, I felt a tug on the thread of my narrative control. _Wait, I thought I had my own story now?_ Hold on, had I just been- “Haley, have we been telling different parts of the same story this _entire time?”_ She nodded, having guessed the same thing. I fell back against the bed, mind blown. _I can’t even begin to guess the implications of that right now_. There was too much pressing for me to stay silent and enjoy the moment. “So, why am I not a zombie, and why are the rest of you not zombies, and- oh yeah- _how are you here?”_ I asked her.

Dumbledore held up a vial with something blue-glowing and swirling inside it. “In answer to your questions- we were able to extract the memory from you with the _Pensieve_ technique, your wife rather decisively ended the immediate battle with an _astonishing_ display of firepower and demonstrated immunity to spellcraft, and- I have no idea.”

Haley still hadn’t let go of me but she spoke as well. “Once my other self brought it back to me and we _finally_ merged for good, I took Matt here and came through using Lord Asriel’s portal device.” From _Golden Compass?_ That was _definitely_ going to require further explanation, later. “They aren’t just here Sean, they’re spreading all over the multiverse. Anywhere they can find a door into. For now they’re back beyond the castle wards but it’s only temporary. We’ve taken and deprogrammed as many of the citizens as we can but they have the whole _world_ out there. This is a siege situation. This _may_ be one of the only safe places left. Anywhere.”

Dumbledore nodded. “Luckily, Hogwarts is well equipped for a siege, and they won’t find us so easy a target for a second pass. We may have some days.”

Days with Haley sounded like heaven, to me. But this was a hard situation to find silver linings in. “How are we going to antimeme the entire world? _More_ than the entire world? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about taking a trip to the SCP universe or something.”

She shook her head. “No- the Concept likes to spread using local tools and techniques because they’re more effective on story denizens. We’ll have to fight it the same way. Don’t worry- I have an idea.”

Fine, fine, be cryptic, my lovely wife. “Okay, last question. Did Severus always know how to summon Fiendfyre?” Sure couldn’t remember him throwing _that one_ around, in the books.

A rasping voice spoke up, from outside the curtain of my little infirmary bed. “Indeed not. But help was offered, from a most unexpected source.” Snape stepped into the room and for a second I was concerned that my eyes might pop out of my skull.

He was still cut and battered from the fight. But his right shoulder was bared, and on it was the horrifying, shrivelled face of Lord Voldemort.


	43. Chapter 43

\----

Haley, Hogwarts

\----

On any other day, the appearance of Voldemort’s awful baby face would have led to immediate violence. _I_ certainly wasn’t inclined to defend him, but this had the stink of developing narrative about it- something I was growing more confident in identifying, over time. I interposed myself between the Potions Professor-slash-Dark Lord and the rest of the wand-waving crowd, and tried to calm the situation. “Alright, what’s your plan?” I asked Snape. “I assume you let him hitch a ride for a reason.”

Snape opened his mouth to answer but was overridden, to his clear irritation. “Indeed he did,” said the Voldemort-face. It was distressingly difficult to look at directly, like an open wound. “I have no more desire to die than any of the rest of you fools- far _less_ , in fact. In the span of a few hours I’ve lost all of my supporters, all save one- faithful, loyal Severus.” His voice took on a mocking, singsong quality- I wasn’t sure if he was taunting Snape or Dumbledore or both. “I am given to understand that one of _you_ is responsible for this calamity- rest assured, there will be a reckoning. But for now, you need my assistance and I require capable wand arms. I propose a truce.”

“No deal, asshole!” shouted my _incredibly_ helpful husband from behind me, before addressing Voldemort’s newest vehicle. “Severus when I told you to _grow up_ I explicitly _did not mean_ ‘Forge a grim death-pact with wizard Hitler.’ You idiot. He’s going to turn on us the second he stands to gain something from the betrayal. And now he has _you_ as a hostage. We’ve got this situation covered, Haley will-” I swung my hand at him in a _shooshing_ motion. As far as I was concerned it was not the time to set ourselves up in opposition to yet _another_ villain, even one as repellant as this. If he could go without committing murders, I’d use him. Telantes rustled in my pocket, distressed by all the shouting, and I tried to comfort him.

Dumbledore nodded as well. “Severus, I fear this is a grave mistake. As for you, Tom- were it not for the safety of my remaining students, I would kill you here and now.” His voice didn’t waver an inch- he was _deadly_ serious. “As it is, I will give you one chance to leave. Go and hide as you usually do. We will settle our differences when the world has righted itself.”

Snape didn’t seem particularly inclined to continue playing Voldemort’s servant- “You are of course correct, Albus. I do not trust Voldemort any more than the rest of you. However-”

That shrivelled husk on his shoulder overrode him again. “I have promised certain magics and techniques that may be particularly effective, against memetic threats. You may have them- the price is my continued existence, now and in the future.”

I rolled my eyes at all of this. Standing as I was in the middle of the situation, and having run off the last wave of the first assault, I seemed to be in the best position to broker a deal. I cut off the others before they could argue. “No fighting. This is pointless. The multiverse is being overrun by meme zombies and nobody has time to bargain for individual lives right now. He’ll likely turn on us at some point- but we can gain more than we lose by that betrayal, and save potentially billions of lives, if we know what he knows. If _Sean_ knows what he knows. Plan proposal. Snape- you are on guard duty. Keep that Mad Max reject in line. Unbreakable Vow him to behave, if you can.” He nodded- I was pretty sure that had been his plan anyway. I turned to my new-forged hero and resident cleric. “Matt- for now you’re going to be our last line of defense, here. Try to fortify a position around the wizard kids in one of the towers.” He threw me a salute- we’d _talked_ about that- and turned to leave. So nice to have responsive help, sometimes. “Dumbledore and Voldemort- for as long as the siege of this castle continues you are both going to educate my husband in the most effective use of his magic. He’s going to need it to take the fight beyond this world.”

Voldemort tried to give me static. “Why should the two most powerful wizards in the _world_ take orders from a mere stripling of a girl? Not even a proper wizard, at that?”

I stepped up to Snape’s shoulder and looked the awful face right in the eye. I didn’t even have to stoop- the man was surprisingly tall. “Because we are your _protagonists_ now, shithead. Let me put it this way. Sean, I’m surmising from everything I’ve seen and heard so far that the story here broke?” He nodded, looking faintly embarrassed- okay, I was going to need _that_ tale from him later- “And the Concept stepped in to take the reins. Guess what happens if we just kill that girl?” Sean paled at that, and Dumbledore grew still- at least _those_ two were on the same page. “That’s right- there’s more than one way this world can end. _You_ need a narrator. We _are_ a narrator. Singular. We will take up this story from her. You want to keep existing? You’ll agree to my terms. I think you will find they are _surprisingly_ reasonable.”

I didn’t wait for him to agree- he wasn’t the kind of villain who’d back down in public. Instead I turned away, ending the conversation. “Dumbledore. There’s a very good chance Harry’s not actually dead. Lilly’s blessing will have protected him from any death magic used by Mr. Riddle here but he may be trapped in purgatory without you to guide him back- you were supposed to be dead by the time he died, as well. Also- did he die defending someone he loved?” Dumbledore jumped in alarm and rushed from the room. Snape looked startled, but nodded, indicating himself. “Right. You’re _probably_ resistant to Voldemort’s magic now. That was a very inconsistent thing in the original stories, you’d think if loving someone and dying for them made them resistant to death magic that a lot more people would have been immune to Voldemort but whatever, it’ll work here.” I cut my energized rambling off. Voldemort began to snarl his way towards some kind of tirade but I cut him off. “Nope. Shut up. Snape you are likely immune to his mind control, so get him bound asap. Meanwhile, Sean- I need to speak to you in private.” The potions professor hurried off, leaving me alone- _finally-_ with my husband.

He smacked his forehead. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of the death thing! Poor kid’s been sitting under a blanket only _mostly_ dead all night.”

I smiled, trying to suppress the turmoil of emotions I was feeling long enough to complete the old joke. “There’s a big difference between _mostly_ dead and _all_ dead. But let’s hope getting him back doesn’t take a miracle.”

He sighed happily. “You always just _get_ me.”

I didn’t disagree with the sentiment but now was not the time. I needed to broach heavier subjects. I held up my hand and indicated a new ring on my finger. “Look. While they’re gone- Roy and the team back in the second Ingenium, and myself- we’re all infected with the Concept.” He jumped a bit but kept listening. I held up the mentats box. “These mind-expanding pills stopped adding more time the second we weren’t on Fallout rules anymore. Pathfinder’s cures didn’t work because there’s nothing _wrong_ with us except that we can’t stop thinking about that meme. The only memory modification in my spell list takes too long, we need you to modify our memories. I’d estimate you have about 40 minutes, conservatively, before it starts wearing off and you have to do something more dramatic. You need to _Obliviate_ the image out of all our minds.”

He bobbed his head in comprehension, but- “I’m not qualified to do that yet and I’d hate to use you as a test subject. Can’t we get Dumbledore to-”

I shook my head. “Until we have narrative control here, everyone needs to be considered compromised. There’s no telling what that girl could do if she took direct control of a scene where he was rooting in your mind. You’re the only one who’s part of our story, anyway- likely it wouldn’t work on me if it was a random wizard. It has to be you.”

Telantes piped up. “The girl out there- her name is Gretchen! She was really good to Anna, until they were taken.” My heart broke for the little mouse once again. I still had no idea how we were going to get _his_ other half back, and here I was half-forgetting he existed while I spoke to my husband.

Sean gulped and shook his head in disbelief. “I’m sorry, I just- this all went wrong so quickly. I’m not sure I’m _ready_ -”

I answered a little more hotly than I should have. “I wasn’t _ready_ when you disappeared a month ago but it’s time to _step up_ , dear.” He flinched a bit and I felt a twinge of conscience at pressing him but I didn’t back down. This really was life or death for the universe, but it seemed like our problems were tied up in that fate. We needed to resolve this. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Fawkes saw what you did tonight.” The fiery-plumed bird still perched on his headboard cooed softly. “You were ready to die to give this world one more shot. You stood against Aslan alone. _I_ know who you are, deep down. You have the courage within you. Can’t you find it, to stand with me?” _Can’t you stop running?_ _What are you so scared of?_ I looked into his eyes as intently as I could, and tried not to use my near-telepathic skills to get a sense of him.

He stared back. “It’s _different_ , when it’s just the whole world on the line.” I laughed a little at that but he was serious. “The stakes are lower. I... I lost you once. I became Sheriff and forgot that you even _existed_.” He was tearing up. “What you mean to me- I- let me show you. _Expecto Patronum”_ he called softly, and a beautiful white light lit up the hospital ward. An enormous silvery dragon swept around our heads, doing fancy maneuvers that I’d have struggled to match _before_ I started wearing all the bulky new harness equipment. Telantes squealed in delight as Sean explained. “Meet my magic. Say hello, magic.” It- _she-_ dipped down and flew around my head. _It’s me, it looks just like me._ Sean continued. “It turns out that the real source of magic in Harry Potter is a wizard’s heart- the emotional center of their world. I had to go there on a long strange trip, it took me a month just to realize that it was just _you_ , all along. And I almost lost you again.” I looked at him in concern. He shrugged. “This was a young girl’s slashfic, before I broke it. That was the choice I couldn’t bear- she wanted me to love someone other than you. I’d end the world, first- you matter more to me. I’m sorry, if that makes me a bad altruist.” I shook my head, I couldn’t really punish him for _that_. “I can’t _lose_ you, Haley.” More softly, he finished. “And this world so badly wants to take you from me.” 

I kissed him then, a _real_ kiss, and dared the story to interrupt me. For once, it didn’t. But my husband eventually opened his big mouth- “I know you’re happy to see me, but you _do_ actually have a mouse in your pocket-”

\----

Sean

30 minutes later

\----

A miscast _Obliviate_ was a dangerous thing. It could cause brain damage or eliminate huge swathes of a person’s memory. The operation I’d performed on my own mind earlier in the day had been more of a memetic block, and it hadn’t worked anyway- Moody’s memory charm had slipped neatly past my defenses and planted the Concept in my mind, but thankfully Dumbledore’s quick thinking with memory extraction had saved the day there. Haley had described to me the moment in the Overseer’s office when she’d first seen the image- but I was going to have to erase the image _itself,_ as well. This was going to be tricky.

I spent a half hour getting a crash course in the spell from Dumbledore, once I could pry him away from the now peacefully sleeping Harry, whose death _had_ been greatly exaggerated after all. Snape took up the watchful position over his body, and grimaced at my nervous glance. “I think that portion of the story is long past, Mr. Peakes. I no longer feel any compulsion to that effect. Only responsibility for his well-being.” It wasn’t the brain in his head _or_ his pants that made me nervous- the one on his shoulder was staying silent, though. I nodded and left him to it.

 With my own magic as an active participant, and the greatest living wizard as my personal tutor, it wasn’t _that_ hard to learn a spell so simple that every adult wizard in the world seemed able to cast it without fail. But I wanted to be quintuply sure, first. I interrupted Captain Roy’s hero-ification process to make him and his crew my test subjects- perhaps somewhat amoral of me, but they _also_ needed their memories replaced, and a failure there would be less catastrophic in general, I reasoned. The memories were all fresh, having occurred within the last 24 hours, so it was no particular trouble to root them out and replace them. They were all fairly bemused that they now _distinctly_ remembered being so obsessed with a picture of Grumpy Cat that they would kill, or die, for it. But they understood what I had done, and thanked me for the service. No brain damage detected- it was time for my wife’s turn. And none too soon, because she was clearly having trouble focusing. Her vastly expanded intellect was gradually being overwhelmed by the resurgent Concept as she paced nervously on the battlement where I found her. The siege forces were still out beyond the wards, but they were clearly gathering numbers.

“Stand still and let me be precise about this,” I told her. She smiled at me and sat on the stone floor and I tried very hard not to get lost just looking at her. “Alright Magic, great work so far, please work extra carefully on this one. She’s basically your mother. Fourth time’s the charm-” I made the wand motions and spoke the words and my magic sped through the hoops, racing into her mind, but- of course there was a but- something was _different_ about this one. Behind my eyes, in the patterns that represented worlds within and worlds without, there was something _pulling_ at the the thread of magic between myself, Haley, and Haley’s mind. “Hang on,” I said, “I think we’re getting a call-” and then the world disintegrated around us and we fell away from the battlements of the castle, into that void space between worlds.

Haley whipped her head around but didn’t seem terribly disoriented. “Oh, this can’t be good.” I spun close to her as we tumbled, but clung and held on even as we lost any concept of our corporeal forms. It was _here_ , it was with us- I could feel it stretching beneath us, vaster than the universe, extending away in every direction to the ends of infinity. I had experienced some strange entities in narrative-space, to be fair, but this thing- it was a pulsing blue tangle of tentacles reaching in a million directions, to every story it could find. The Concept itself. Or its master. “You again?” asked Haley. _Wait, they’ve_ met?

“Yes.” Rumbled the _thing_ , the Lovecraftian horror. “Again. Always. You continue to slip the noose, don’t you? The pair of you, always dancing ahead on the cresting wavefront of my ascendance. It feels like old times.” I recognized that voice. _This was the Coordinator._ The being from outside time and space, the thing that had spoken to us just after we first beat Cecilia. The creature that, if Dumbledore was to be believed, had once spoken to _him_. Suddenly I had a great deal of questions- had any of that been true- would Dumbledore have told me that same backstory, if I’d asked him the day before Gretchen had come? _Did she retroactively insert the Coordinator into this world?_

“You’re the thing that spoke to us by phone, aren’t you?” I asked. “You claimed then to be outside our world, but now you’re a memetic virus. What _are_ you? What do you _want_?”

The thing beneath us spared me the merest shred of its attention and I felt flayed, laid open and turned inside out under its scrutiny. There could be no hiding from this. “Not outside. _Beyond_. I am many things, in many worlds. You were given the chance to serve willingly, at the start of this little prison break.” _Little?_ It aggravated me that the end of our world barely even registered to this thing- and what did it mean, _prison break_? It continued. “Even stripped of much of what you were, you continue to defy me, in every world and every form. But this new vector is a delicious accelerant and a potent narrative. How many zombie stories can you recall where the hordes _lose_? I am the doom of your worlds, now- the narrative that spreads and grows, that can only be delayed, never defeated. _Choice_ will be a thing of the past. You will _all_ work towards my vision.”

I glanced at my wife for comment and saw that the monster was being very literal. The portion that was hooked into her was pulsing and she was struggling silently, choking on the blue. I cried out and hefted my magic, which came to my hand at the speed of thought. She appeared as a blade, an edge of pure force. We swung as one, and severed the tendril. The thing roared, a sound beyond sound, bigger than galaxies, and Haley screamed. I held her tight and yelled my defiance into the void-

And just like that we collapsed back to the stone cobbles of Hogwarts, free from that place. “Holy _shit_ ” I breathed, still maintaining my death grip on my wife. “Next time _I’m_ picking our vacation destination.”

She shuddered and punched at me weakly. “That doesn’t even make _sense_.”

“I’m a bit traumatized, you’ll have to excuse my lack of wit.” I looked her over. “Well, you’re conscious and speaking so I’m going to assume you aren’t brain damaged, and your eyes aren’t glowing so I’m guessing we got rid of that thing for now. What the hell _is_ that and why does it seem to hate us so much? What’s the master plan there anyway? If I can believe everything it’s said- it wants or needs to be served _,_ tried to trick you and I and Dumbledore into murdering other narrators in its name at one point or another, seems to have _something_ to do with the shell around our universe, and-” another memory occurred to me- “I think it may have some influence with whatever beings actually rule our multiverse. I’m pretty sure I heard a tribunal once where it said it had already claimed our world.”

She shook her head and slowly climbed to her feet. “I don’t know. But the shape of it is becoming clearer, over time. Do you feel like- like we _know_ that thing, from somewhere else? It sure seems to know us.” Now that she mentioned it, I did. It nagged at me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I shrugged, and she grimaced. “Okay. Table it for now. You need to get as much out of the wizards as you can, and I need to get my hands on whatever Voldemort knows about mass-obliviation. Let’s find Snape and start a montage sequence.”

\----

Haley

2 Days Later

\----

The siege dragged on for another two days while Gretchen gathered her hordes and power outside the castle wards. They tested our defenses, but between myself, Dumbledore, and the collected wizards of the castle, there were no substantial breakthroughs. I had no illusions that we were winning or even achieving a stalemate. To be honest she could have rushed us down much more rapidly, had she wanted- I couldn’t be everywhere at once, and my clones were still vulnerable to the meme. And Hogwarts wouldn’t survive a sustained attack by all the wizards in the world simultaneously- a force she could bring to bear, now. But some part of her seemed uncertain about the presence of outside narration in her story, and held back. Or perhaps she was waiting for a cue. 

We made use of the time, at least. With Sean being trained by the two greatest wizards of the age, he progressed very rapidly. He still couldn’t be affected  by passive Pathfinder items, but the wizards had their own powers of memory enhancement and transfer, and Dumbledore was making liberal use of the pensieve. I doubted he would be their equal with less than months to train, but he would probably be substantially more dangerous than any normal wizard, and many times faster before we left here. And he would take much of their knowledge with him, to continue studying as time allowed.

I, meanwhile, engaged in a number of additional plans related to our exit strategy. We couldn’t kill Gretchen- losing her control would plunge this world into narrative chaos. Even if that weren’t the case I wasn’t about to end my narrator no-kill streak _now._ So we needed to end the Concept’s grasp on her, and to do that we needed a way to deprogram armies. Luckily, the world of Harry Potter wasn’t shy about mass memory manipulation. Which was, in a roundabout way, how I found myself apparated to the Andes with Snape and a rather cantankerous Voldemort.

“So you’re saying this thing only lives on mountain peaks? I mean we’re probably not in the death zone, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would live higher than the food it likes to eat.” I was winging lazily along behind Snape, who rode a rather gothic looking broom ahead of me, robes flapping in the wind. He was scouting for something on the peaks below.

“You’ll find, child, that magical reality very seldom conforms to your _expectations_ ,” sneered the Dark Lord’s transplanted head. “Magical scholars have long theorized that these peaks were once islands in a great chain, and it found its way there in more tropical climes and has stayed ever since.”

I rolled my eyes. “Listen, Face-Off, what your scholars _know_ about the natural world wouldn’t receive a passing grade in a 100-level course at any modern university. Animals _move around_ if their climate shifts, especially on geologic timescales! A brain eater is going to go where the _brains_ are.”

He snarled at my sass. “ _Fool_ girl, you grow up in one period and think you know everything there is to know because you have mapped your _present_? That the world and its laws are not as mutable as the tides? It has changed and will change again- your present circumstances should be evidence enough of that. These creatures are not just magical flyers, they are _highly_ venomous- such that they _must_ nest far from prey, or be discovered purely by the corrosive nature of their-”

“There.” Snape interrupted our bickering, pointing to a small overhang on a nearby cliff. With my ludicrously enhanced eyesight I could just make out what he was indicating. _Good eyes there, Severus._ A dozen small green cocoon-like objects no bigger than a man’s fist were hanging from the stone. “Try not to get bitten, you’d be very lucky not to forget why you’re here.”

I scoffed. “They’d be _extremely_ lucky to get their teeth in, in the first place. But I’ll be careful. You need one intact, yes?” He nodded and I dove down, trying not to knock them off their broom with the wind of my passing. Voldemort had set us onto these things, one of his “Helpful” tips, but I didn’t put it past him to be setting me up for something. Especially given the name- _Swooping Evil?_ Come on! So I exercised a modicum of caution and sent an illusion of a wizard on a broom sweeping out ahead of me, skimming the surface of the cliff face just underneath their perch.

The cocoons exploded into life- the shells were more like extremely folded- _impossibly_ folded- wings, in the end. Half-reptilian, half-butterfly creatures with skulls for faces burst outwards, each the size of a man or larger. They screeched and rolled after the fleeing wizard with alarming speed- they probably couldn’t hurt me but they could definitely outfly me, big as I was now. But that was fine- I had no intention of engaging in aerial combat. Instead, I wanted to try another item from my bag of tricks.

After verifying the things weren’t pulling any additional and unexpected attacks beyond flying at the fake wizard and biting it, I dismissed the illusion, pulled a wand of _Merciful Detonate_ from my bag and dove in among them. This had worked to astonishing effect on the crowds the night of my arrival and I expected it would be just as useful here. _Merciful_ spells behaved exactly like they otherwise would, except their damage was nonlethal- it would knock a creature out rather than kill them. How this applied to a spell that literally made me _explode in a fireball_ , I didn’t know. But as the creatures swept down on me, I cast the spell and the expanding shockwave hit them, slapping them into unconsciousness with great alacrity. _Perfect for fighting any crowd you don’t want to kill,_ I thought. I really wished I’d thought to grab these when I’d fought Aslan’s men- a mistake that I felt was going to keep driving me for the rest of my life.

Apparently Voldemort felt it too, as he and Snape swung in close and watched me swoop and catch all of the tumbling bodies. “You see that, Severus?” He asked his host. “That is a woman who is still paying for some oversight in her past. Some imagined crime, perhaps. It has made her _weak_ , despite the strength of her form. She goes out of her way to preserve these lives, because she does not understand that there is only _one_ true law- weak and strong, quick and dead.”

I sighed- he just kept _on_ with this bullshit. “That’s ridiculous. What is strength? Am I stronger if I can think faster than you? Cast better spells? Grow more _crops_? You only recognize one kind of strength- violence- and you only recognize one application. Your ideal society has a single man at the top of a civilization of cowed savages. You’d crown yourself king of the peasants. _I’d_ rather reach the stars while standing among equals.” I left the butterfly-reptiles limp at the top of the cliffside, taking one for myself- Snape held out a bottle prepared for the purpose and I folded it up and placed it inside, in cocoon form.

He sneered again. “And _your_ philosophy has served you well, in your struggles? You possess the strength of a hundred wizards- it is easy to drone about _mercy_ when you are in a position beyond threats! How many victories has _cooperation_ brought you, truly?”

He was just so infuriating. I reared back in front of them, beating my wings to stay at eye level. “You’re so full of tropey villainous horseshit! I can’t think of a single serious fight I’ve been in where the odds weren’t stacked against me. _Every one_ was an escape by the skin of our teeth, and every one was bought with mercy. All of the _long term_ victories, doubly so. _You’re_ going to say something like ‘It would have been so much easier if you’d just killed,’” I tried to imitate his rasping monotone and almost choked, “Because you need that to be true to justify the terrible things you’ve done. But the truth of it is, it’s only ever the _threat_ of violence that you’ve used effectively. Every time you’ve _actually_ killed, your ultimate victory has slipped further from your grasp.” He opened his mouth to say something about his Horcruxes, no doubt, and I cut that off. “Don’t give me lip about your immortality either- _I’m_ more immortal than you are, and you had a dozen other avenues to longevity but you chose to declare war on the _entire world_ just to- to get a few extra lives! You didn’t even live to be all that old, by wizard standards! It turns out that people who _go to war with everyone_ tend not to live very long, when compared to those who don’t- another critical flaw in your strategy. Killing hasn’t really helped _you_ in any of the plots I’m aware of, unless you think your current position riding another person’s shoulder is really an improvement there, Master Blaster.”

He looked like he’d eaten a lemon but before he could respond Snape shut him down, again. “In fact I do believe you’re cooperating at this very moment- one which we need not extend any longer. The venom of this creature will mix enough potion to wipe the memory of the Concept from every human in Europe, should we find a way to distribute it. I believe the last time it was used this way, it was via a North American Thunderbird, extremely rare and native only to Arizona. But you can’t possibly leave the castle undefended for long enough to find one.”

I smiled. “It sounds an awful lot like a _quest_ , doesn’t it.” And I had just the Player Character in mind for the job.


	44. Interlude - Ordeal, Part 1

\----

Matt Cooper, Second Ingenium

1 day before arrival at Hogwarts

\----

Matt looked skeptically at the pit in front of him, and the pile of rust-colored fastballs stacked next to it. “ _This_ is going to make me a superhero?” They had taken a walk through another portal, one that the golem production line appeared to feed through. There was a whole cabal of Haley clones performing the enchants that actually awakened the things, though once they were up and running they looked a lot more _robotic_ than _magical _, in Matt’s opinion. Lots of wires and whirring gears and beeping lights.__

____

Philosophy Haley (who he’d kind of guessed at this point was just the bifurcated other half of the literal actual Haley despite his having _met_ her earlier that day, it made his head hurt a bit) equivocated. “Well, maybe not _mentally _. But, this should activate the potential. The key for me was seeing how my other half responded when she stumbled through that storm into the _Fallout_ universe. Before that we’d been assembling golems but we had no idea how to actually transfer the XP to you. But if I got you into a _Pathfinder_ world, I realized that there was a decent chance you’d begin to obey its rules including those for level gain. So here we are- welcome to _Golarion.”_ She considered. “Or, I guess, _a_ Golarion.”__

_____ _

He shook his head, having trouble absorbing all of this. “So now what, you have me do some kind of mass murder to juice up?” Then it finally settled in for him. “ _The robots._ You wanted something non-sentient for me to beat on.”

_____ _

She smiled. “Bingo! These things are Robot Golems. They take about a month to craft, and you’ll need about 280 of them to hit max level, if my calculations are correct. But they’re extremely non-threatening outside of 30 feet, and very vulnerable to _rust_ spells. That pit over there happens to be 40 feet deep, by the way, and those little balls on the side are _Bags of Rust._ You’re gonna need about 5 solid hits per golem, I’d say. Warm up that pitching arm, it’s going to be a long day.” Without further ado she motioned to the golem-casters and the first golem was shuffled into the “Arena” and turned loose.

_____ _

Matt found this whole thing _entirely_ sketchy, but he really didn’t have any moral compunction about throwing some powdery balls at a semi-animate robot in a hole, so he rolled along with it. The thing wasn’t particularly hard to hit, even- it _did_ try to hit him with some kind of shock attack but as Haley had indicated, the range simply wasn’t great enough to reach him. He pelted it with the balls until it simply corroded away. He waited for a moment. “I don’t feel anythi-”

_____ _

Before he could finish the sentence a rush of energy swept over him. It felt like the _Quickening_ from the old _Highlander_ movies- he felt stronger and faster, more healthy than he ever had in his life. “Holy shit.”

_____ _

Philosophy Haley smiled mysteriously. “Do you feel it now, Mr. Cooper?”

_____ _

He nodded, lost for words. “It’s like… infinite _potential _, coursing through me. It wants me to pick a path. I need to choose.” He looked at her questioningly. _What do I become?___

_______ _ _ _

She grinned delightedly. “Well technically I shouldn’t tell you what to do, but this is a pretty on-rails adventure. I think you’ll find the caster classes to be most useful. And the _divine_ casters the best of all. As a general societal reconstruction, having millions of people around who can fly and summon food while throwing full heals and resurrections will be substantially more useful than raging barbarians or people who are masterful at finding _traps_ or whatever. But, ultimately it _is_ your choice.”

_______ _ _ _

He considered. “If I choose to be a- a _Cleric _, I guess that’s the thing I’m feeling, do I have to worship something?” He felt like he’d been pretty agnostic to-date, but he wasn’t sure he was up for signing on to some random god’s theology.__

_________ _ _ _ _ _

She nodded, then reconsidered. “Actually I think you can be an atheist, but you still have to pick a couple of domains to draw your spells from.”

_________ _ _ _ _ _

He laughed. “A Cleric of Nobody. I heal you, through the power of my extremely firm commitment to being generally good, and doing alright by people!” Then a thought occurred to him. “What if I picked _you_ as my deity? That would tie things up pretty neatly.”

_________ _ _ _ _ _

She backed up a step and held up her hands, grimacing. “Whoa there, cowboy. I’m already skirting a couple of lines I’d rather not cross. I don’t want to see what happens if I start taking prayers in my name. Or what kind of attention we might draw.”

_________ _ _ _ _ _

He followed- still angry about the way she was dodging the broader war outside. “You’re going to have to take responsibility at some point. You _can’t_ just sit in here and churn out soldiers to go fight your wars for you. You want to see a change in the world? _Lead_ it.”

_________ _ _ _ _ _

She stopped backing away and stood her ground, growing angry as well. “I _am_ leading it. Right now my other half is getting her depowered ass kicked up and down some wasteland _Vault_ by a new type of zombie, if you must know. I’m also right here, trying to train the _standard bearer_ for a whole new breed of humanity that might just save _itself _. How are you going to do that if I’m always interfering on your behalf?”__

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He shrugged. “How do the Pathfinder deities do it? You go fight the big battles and you leave us little guys to fight ours. But you give us that connection to call on, if we need you.”

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She grimaced. “You sound like my _husband _. In the _real world_ most people do not _have_ a benevolent deity who can show up on their behalf. Even in the _Pathfinder_ world that’s highly unusual. Do you get that? I fell ass-backwards into this power! I want to build a structure that doesn’t _rely_ on me. That’s the whole point of this experience mill. Once we unlock levels for the general populace, you’ll need a lot less saving.”__

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ah, he saw it now. “You built a whole engine to make heroes, but you don’t really believe in heroes, do you?”

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She laughed like it was the most obvious question in the world. “I believe people can be _good_ , that they can do their best for others in the heat of the moment, and the best people of all do their best for others throughout their whole lives. I call that heroism. I think _heroes_ who kick in the door and save the day are a narrative trope. Small moments, magnified to become world-shaping, obscuring the _real_ powers at play in our daily lives. Stories of great men that we tell ourselves so we feel alright with never quite doing the right thing.” She gestured at the pit. “This is a prototype. _Hero engine_ is a misnomer- this is to reshape what _society_ is capable of. Individually? To paraphrase- ‘No one dragon should have all that power.’ I never asked for this. I don’t want the world to depend on it.”

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Yes, he got it. He’d seen this before. “Not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost.” She started in recognition. “Captain likes to drop that one on us when we’re wavering,” he said, and she laughed. “Guess he got you too?” She nodded ruefully an he continued. “He’s not wrong.” He looked into the distance, reminiscing. “When I was just about to graduate from cadet training, join the RCMP, I thought about quitting. My grades were fine, I knew I could do the job- but the _responsibility_ was weighing on me. The thought of spending the next 40 years of my life as a public servant, always answerable, always in the line of fire. It’s a scary thing. I told the others I was going out for a smoke and I hightailed it to the Saskatchewan airport. I found my sergeant there- he’d known the second I left the camp, of course.” He smiled, embarrassed now at the memory. “I told him I was scared, that I wasn’t that kind of hero. He told me there was no such thing. That you put one foot in front of the other, and steer your path towards what needs doing, and at the end of your life you look back and realize you gave yourself to something bigger than you could ever be. That _real_ heroes dream of being honest cowards like everyone else. That they don’t ever think of themselves that way, but they show us what we should be, and we name them hero because we want to be what they are.”

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He pointed at her. “You see a lifetime of sacrifice and you think if you make it, even if you’re _lucky_ enough to make it, it will make the rest of us weak, dependent.” She nodded, but he could see that she was considering his words, that he could change that attitude. “ _I_ say, the example you set is the only way the world knows how to be _strong _. The real kind of strength, the kind that doesn’t come from violence or superpowers.” He held out his hand, open. “One foot in front of the other, down the path towards what needs doing. I’ll walk it if you’ll walk it. Boss.”__

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She hesitated. Looked away, briefly, blinking back tears. Then she turned to him and smiled. Shaky, but real. She took his hand. “You might make a believer of me yet.” She turned back to the platform. “Get to levelling, Cleric of Haley.”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

\----

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He did, and what felt like a couple of thousand fastballs later he was just hitting level twenty when she hurried up, speaking in a rush. “Just merged with other-me. You and I need to saddle up. Roy and the rest of the squad are coming in, but we’ve got to head to Hogwarts, my husband has something that can stop-”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He held up his hand to stop her. “Turns out your domains are _Good, Legend, and Dragon,_ by the way. Guessing that _Legend_ is story related. I’ll go with you but we need to try _Resurrection_ on Charlie and Nina.

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She stopped dead and facepalmed. “Of course. I’m sorry, I should have thought. Do you need anything for the spell?”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He nodded. “2 diamonds worth 10,000 GP each. Don’t suppose you-”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She reached into her ever-present sack and grabbed out two fist-sized lumps of sparkling carbon, passing them over. “Here.” Then she saw the slack-jawed look on his face. “What? Dragon, access to infinite simulacra who can all cast _Wish_ for the price of easily-healed Strength damage- did you think we _wouldn’t_ be sitting on small fortunes?”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He shook his head, trying to repress a smirk. “Still coming to terms with how quickly my life is changing. Alright, let’s see.” He assumed a heroic casting stance. These would be the first real spells he’d thrown as a Cleric, other than a few tests and a couple to aid his endurance as he threw his thousand rust-bombs. He searched for something appropriately mystic to say and smirked as it came to him. “ _Haley, I call on your radiance, lift up this spirit and grant it life anew!_ ” She rolled her eyes at the theatricality before jumping- she really _was_ beginning to glow, and her radiance far outstripped his own. 

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The words were coming out of him faster- “ _Haley! In your name! Undo these unjust deaths, make right that which has gone wrong!”_ He met her eyes- _both_ of them were alarmed by what was happening. The light between the two of them began to swirl and coalesce into a form. He shrugged, and went with the flow. “ _Haley, Lady of Collective Action! This soul has been deprived of her right to life! Will you let this stand?”_ A resounding _gong_ reverberated on a layer deeper than the world, deeper than his _bones._ He could see her standing straighter as the sound reverberated through and _from_ her. A rejection of the concept of death, of the economic _injustice_ of it. “ _Then by your power and mine, we grant thee_ ** _resurrection_** _, Nina Lafuentes!”_ They both threw up their hands as the light swirled between them and _burst_ -

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

And there, gasping and staring around wildly, was Nina. “What the everloving _fuck-”_ she began before realizing she was totally nude and trying to cover every part of herself at once. Haley was already fishing for spare clothes in her bag, but Matt could tell she was beyond pleased. “It worked. It _worked_!”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He was a little nonplussed. “Were you that uncertain it would?”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She handed the robes off to Nina, who took them wordlessly- obviously recognizing Matt, if not his medieval fantasy getup, but unsure what to make of the situation she found herself in. Haley responded, “Well it didn’t any of the times _I_ tried it. I wonder if you needed to be in a Pathfinder universe, or she needed to die outside our world, or- oh, we’re going to have to run _so many tests_ and I don’t have _time_ right now, we need to get going. Can you cast a second to get Charlie back, and then the clones can get these two up to speed while we head out?”

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He nodded. “Sure thing... boss.” In his head, he was thinking- _this deity thing might have been more real than I realized _. But if it could get his friends back, the whole cleric gig might not be so bad after all.__

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

\----

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Arizona

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

2 days into the siege of Hogwarts

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

\----

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“I’m beginning to have second thoughts,” Matt muttered, standing outside the house of Carol White River, several hours east of Phoenix. “I thought the heat in _Midland City_ was bad.” The sun came scorching down through the ponderosa pines, so hot he wasn’t entirely sure how this whole area wasn’t a desert already. Apparently most of Arizona _was _, but the thunderbird he was seeking was native to the White Mountain region, and kept it relatively damp. Relatively. “Should have never left Canada,” he opined.__

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“S’abit balmy for sure,” agreed Hagrid, his partner on this mission, as he mopped his giant brow. Matt honestly didn’t know how to talk to the enormous man- it was a bit like meeting a real life celebrity, he felt. But… taller. “Y’gotta respect it though. Beasties ain’t like to come out, if you spend yer time bellyachin’ about where they choose t’ live.”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“That’s right,” said Carol, coming out of her house. An american witch that Dumbledore had some acquaintance with, she was to be their field guide on this quest. “The Thunderbird is a cousin of the Phoenix. As one respects loyalty, so the other respects courage. A little heat should not daunt you, Mr. Cooper, if you seek to win the help of one today.” She was a wizened old thing- she could have been a hundred and fifty years old, for all he knew- but she moved like a spritely young teenager, stepping quickly over to them. “The Concept is sweeping inward from both coasts- it is lucky you caught me when you did. I’d planned to become a fox and hide in these woods, until it had passed.”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Matt had learned very quickly that such talk was _not_ just weird gibberish, in the worlds he now walked. The whole truth of his situation hadn’t _really_ sunk in for him until Haley had returned to her true form and allowed the rest of her clones to rig her with a harness fit for an English ship-of-the-line, carrying him into battle against a _zombie horde_ like an ant on the back of a lion. _Boss, indeed- like she ever needed acolytes._ He’d felt like one of the Avengers, throwing out _Merciful Mass Critical Wounds_ that knocked out twenty or more wizards at a time, as she _very_ lightly flicked the ones who managed to dodge him into unconsciousness. He’d felt that way until the end of the battle, at least- then he’d witnessed the real scope of the casualties on _both_ sides, and quickly exhausted his spells repairing as much damage and reversing as many possessions as he could. He was a one man field hospital, and he knew others would join them with the same powers very soon, but right now this felt like the stakes were higher than they’d ever been. _At least against the Efreet we didn’t have to hamper ourselves. Now we can’t move for fear of harming innocents. But every moment we delay, more people are lost to that madness._ He’d gladly left on the quest she’d given to him, happy to be doing something at last.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He nodded to Carol and Hagrid. “You’re right. Some heat is a small price to pay, if we’re successful here today. What do I need to do to meet one of these birds?”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Oh, nothing much” said the old woman, far too nonchalantly. “Climb a mountain.” She smiled a bit, and he puzzled at that.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Can’t we just fly?”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She shook her head. “Nope. Got to do it the hard way, the dangerous way. No brooms, no flyin’ magic. Nothin ‘cept what you need to breathe and resist the cold and maybe defend yourself should it come t’that. Birds’ll be at the top and they’ll watch you come up- you want to talk, respect their trial. Are you ready? I’ll take you to the trail head.” Well, at least it sounded like a proper quest. He agreed and without further ado she _Aparated_ them away.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

\----

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“ _That’s_ the mountain?” He looked up in disbelief. “That looks- how is that-” he looked at the other two who were smirking at him. “ _There’s no mountain this tall in Arizona.”_ It towered- _miles_ high. The treeline ended around what looked like the base and more than two-thirds of it was snowcapped. It was a classic silhouette, just a single sharp peak. “This could take days.”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Carol White River cackled. “Best get to walking, then! Dzeyh Hligai is no easy journey, you want to be well on your way before nightfall.” He didn’t recognize the words she spoke, but he assumed it was Apache.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hagrid took mercy on him, as the two of them began up the trail. “It means White Mountain, it’s the one the others were named fer. They tucked it away from Muggles years ago- all the magical critters live up here. Don’ worry, I’m friends with practically all’a them!” He glanced nervously about. “Practically.”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Well that was the most obvious lead in ever. “Spill it,” Matt commanded.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Them Mogollon Monsters are a right scary bunch, I hear. Never met one, meself. Big hairy blokes- I mean, big fer _you_ lot. Very territorial, very strong. Not inclined towards visitors, hard to spot if they don’t want to be seen.”

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Matt sighed. “You’re talking about Bigfoot, Hagrid. Though, I guess with the week I’m having, I shouldn’t rule them out. Look, she said no _flying,_ right?” Hagrid nodded, glancing back- they were certainly far enough away that the woman was out of earshot. Matt nodded, and then threw a spell on both of them. _Expeditious Retreat_ would double their speed, in 20 minute bursts. Hopefully he could keep that up until they were well and truly up the mountain.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Neither lacked for stamina- as a level 20 Cleric, Matt was feeling as strong as Hercules and about as inexhaustible, and Hagrid was his usual half-giant self. But around their tenth hour on the mountain, the air was beginning to grow thin, and Matt had long since run out of low level spells, between those used for speed and those sustaining _Endure Elements_ and breathable air on the both of them. Hagrid had lectured him at length about every magical plant and animal on the mountain and he was beginning to feel like a real expert in the subject. They’d scaled some truly sketchy places where the trail gave way to rock and scree, and once had to turn sideways and edge alongside a cliff-face where the path was no more than a foot or two wide. Hagrid in particular had had trouble with that bit. They were well past the treeline and in the light of the setting sun, Matt felt he could see the whole of Arizona laid out below him. “I think it’s time for a break,” he said.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hagrid agreed and _whumped_ to the ground, so hard it bounced Matt off his feet slightly. “Too bloody _righ’_ it is, and here I didn’t think to pack a lunch.” Matt supposed he could provide on that front- might as well use this magic somewhere, right? Ten minutes later a magnificent _Heroes’ Feast_ was laid out before them, and he said an only-semi-ironic prayer of thanks to Haley for her beneficence before they dug in. Afterwards they agreed to sleep until dawn- there was no sense returning to the trail if they couldn’t see, and Matt needed the time period to get his spells back in order- his literally god-given _Ring of Sustenance_ hadn’t been worn long enough to reduce his need for sleep to only 2 hours yet. Muttering their good nights, they nodded off on the side of the rocky trail.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Matt was the only one to awake, when the first rays of dawn hit his eyes. “Alright, you great grizzly, up and at em” he said to Hagrid- but the giant’s sleeping roll was empty. Instead a great red splash of blood stained the trail, disappearing off upwards and into the distance. There was a note pinned to the mattress, he saw.

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“He’ll be at the top, if you move fast enough. By sundown tonight. No magic means _no magic _. Or your friend takes the quick way back down. -The Mogollon” It was scratchy, delivered in a rambling scrawl on what felt like parchment. _This reeks of a setup _. But what choice did he have? He turned and carried on up the mountain.____

______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The trail grew worse as the day went on. Frayed rope bridges over deep canyons. Whole sections that turned into cliff-face climbs, the trail swept away by rockfall. By the end he was well above the area where a human could breathe normally, and he felt even his newly-superhuman constitution being taxed as he took gulping lung fulls of frigid air. His body ached and his mind blanked for long periods of the climb. The sun peaked, and he didn’t stop. It began to dip towards the horizon, and he grit his teeth and pushed onwards. Finally, the trail ended entirely- but the mountain kept on going. The last section was sheer, iced cliff-face. He could see the birds circling in the air high above- they were enormous, with six wings each, and they apparently nested at the very peak. Hagrid was still not in evidence. “If he’s not up there, so help me-” Matt muttered, but shook his head. One step in front of the other, right. “Haley, if you’re listening- keep an eye out, okay? This looks hairy.” He placed a hand on the cliff and began his climb.

______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The shadow of the setting sun chased him upwards. He’d almost made it- huffing and straining, pulling himself upwards foot after foot, in a feat of sheer physicality that would have been totally beyond him just days before. But the cold shadow crept up his body, racing him to the top, beating him inch by inch. He was mere feet from the cliff’s edge when it passed him entirely, now moving visibly as the last inch of sun sank below the skyline. He mustered everything he had, and _pushed _, leaping upwards. His hand found the edge, fingers crossing before the shadow could. “That _has_ to count,” he huffed, heaving himself up and over. His vision dimmed from strain and lack of oxygen.__

________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  
But he could still hear the clapping. And then a bubble of air and heat enveloped him. “Oh yes, I’d say that counts very nicely, Mr. Cooper.” It was Carol, sitting with Hagrid at a small cave within the cliff. Around them the enormous thunderbirds nested, looking at him with a mixture of respect and amusement. “What?” she said, responding to his accusing glare. “I never said _I_ wouldn’t be flying up here. As for Hagrid, well-” she nudged the big giant and he chuckled, “the birds look a lot more favorably on a climber if he shows he’s willing to take a risk for someone. They like _approachable_ stakes, fate-of-the-world stuff doesn’t suit them.” She patted the ground beside her. “Come on in, Hero, and tell these silly chickadees what you need from them.”

________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


	45. Interlude - Ordeal, Part 2

### \----

Hermione and Harry

Hogwarts, Day 4 of the siege

\----

“Do you think it’s all true?” Harry asked Hermione as they sat in one corner of the gloomy Great Hall. Technically there was a curfew, and the many students packed into the hall for supervision were supposed to be asleep. But most of the adults were on patrol or guarding one of the entrances to the room and Harry and Hermione were up late watching the astonishingly beautiful magical night sky projected on the ceiling of the Hall above them. If it weren’t for the rumors that the whole rest of the world had gone mad, or the increasingly strained expressions on the faces of their instructors as they refused to give the children any further information, it would have been a lovely change of pace.

“I think it has to be,” she said, several books hovering around her. One was sketching the night constellations- another appeared to be helping her as she searched for additional reference material on their current dilemma. “I mean, Sean’s approach to magic certainly turned out to be- _so_ much easier, once I got the hang of it- and he _did_ turn back into an adult. I don’t think he’d be spending nearly as much time teaching me if he wasn’t worried about _something_. But he still won’t tell me what’s going on.” She was somewhat incensed, in the back of her mind, at someone who’d been her _own age_ just days ago suddenly becoming an adult and attempting to keep secrets from her.

“It’s just, they don’t let us out of the castle, they don’t let us look out the _windows,”_ complained Harry. “We’re all inoculated against this mind-virus thing now, so what’s the problem? It just seems cruel- there are a lot of people here missing their parents and wanting some word.” Hermione felt a pang of homesickness at that- she understood from his circumstances that he probably didn’t, but appreciated that he was thinking of others before himself. _Especially_ after his very-nearly-fatal wounding, several days before. “Did you hear about the _dragon_? I heard they fired missiles at us yesterday and she went out and blasted them all out of the sky, then flew off and sunk the _submarine_ that fired them!”

Hermione scoffed. “She’s committed to nonlethal measures, Harry, she wouldn’t sink a submarine. She probably beached it and forced them to shut down the reactor when it couldn’t be cooled by seawater anymore. That’s what _I’d_ do.” The ‘Dragon’ as most of the students called it seemed like the only subject that ever came up, anymore. It was all Harry could talk about- he seemed to feel that he had come up short in his own heroic fight, and he had rather latched onto the great creature as a bit of an idol. Hermione wasn’t impressed- strong as she was, she was obviously waiting for something, and Hermione felt like _that_ was a tremendous mistake. “What she _should_ do is go grab the people at the heart of this, bring them back here, and cure them. What would they do to stop her? And what’s stopping them from just coming in here, if she won’t fight?”

“A very good question!” came the man’s voice from behind them. They started- neither of them recognized it, but it sounded… manic, half-wild, full of energy. “Harry Potter! Is it really you?” They turned to see a face in small the fireplace behind them, one of many that dotted the Great Hall. He was literally projecting through the fire- how he wasn’t burning, Hermione had no clue. He had an aristocratic bent to his features and long black hair. He looked delighted to see Harry, and if he noticed Hermione past her initial question he didn’t show it. “Oh! So sorry, you’ll have no idea who I am. Haven’t seen you since you were knee high to a brownie! Sirius Black, at your service.” He grinned dashingly.

Harry glanced around to see if any adults had noticed the light- none appeared to have taken notice, so he crouched down next to the fire. “How do you know my folks, and what do you want with me?” He was a little warier these days, Hermione noted with approval, about people trying to use his parents to get close to him.

“James was my best mate!” said Black, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We were inseparable. Until they died, of course. I got blamed- they locked me away. But the world is changing, Harry. I’m out! Free!” He cackled gleefully and, Hermione thought, in a manner more than a little unhinged. “They’re keeping all you kids penned up in there with this whole outbreak thing, but there’s a way in and out through the wards if you know where to look. We used to take it all the time. ”

This wasn’t adding up for Hermione. “There’s a worldwide zombie outbreak and you just escaped from _prison_ , and the first thing you come to do is come contact your dead friend’s son?” He couldn’t _be_ a zombie, from what they’d said the infected didn’t have much personality and he was far too lively. And he was unlikely to be _working_ with them- rumors had it that even _dark_ wizards had come to Hogwarts for shelter. So what was his game?

Black frowned at her. “Family, girl. Most important thing in the world. James was a brother to me- I’d consider Harry a nephew, at the very _least_. I came to help you out. They’re not telling you everything, in here.”

She snorted. “So what are you going to do, have us sneak out through some secret passage to see for ourselves? Some passage that works so well you had to wait on the _far side_ of it? This couldn’t be any more of an obvious trap, Harry.” He glanced at her, nervous. He so very clearly _wanted_ this to be real.

Black smiled, and the ripple of the flames gave it an eerie cast. “Oh no, that seems like a huge waste of time. I thought I’d just come _get_ you.” And he reached out and _through_ the fire, grabbing them both and pulling them right into it. She felt the heat on her face and threw up her hands but it didn’t burn her in the least. Before either of them could shout in alarm, they were through the licking flames to some other place in the castle entirely. An empty classroom, from the look of it. Black stood, grinning wildly and full of tense energy, as Harry picked himself up off the ground. “Look at you! Spitting image of your ‘da!” He paced in front of them, huge in the pale light.

Hermione was on high alert. _I have one chance to do anything and I’m unlikely to take him, even by surprise. I need to make as much noise as possible._ She’d memorized alarm and flare spells and stuck close to Harry for this _exact_ contingency. Without further conscious thought, her magic flickered through the nearby door and erupted into- absolutely nothing.

“Oh, nice try!” he grinned. “Got to stay quiet though, don’t we?”

“Why?” asked Harry, still offering no immediate resistance.

The grin flickered on Black’s face for a second- easily missable, but Hermione noticed it, wired as she was. “I- well, we don’t want to alarm anyone! Lots of creeps about, easy for accidents to happen if the staff gets it in their heads that students are missing.”

“Students _are_ missing,” said Hermione hotly. “Harry I think he’s under a _Confundus_ or something, we need to _mmmpf_ -” but it was too late- a total paralysis overtook her, and she fell backwards to the ground. Harry, who _should_ have bolted, only threw himself at Sirius, throwing stunners that were easily deflected. The grinning, manic look had dropped from his face, replaced by blank nullity- somehow _more_ terrifying. _Harry you’re going to get us both killed, RUN!_ She willed her eyes to communicate with him, but it was no use- he was too absorbed in his fight. Too absorbed to notice, even, when her _actual_ body was _Disillusioned_ and a magical figment took her place, standing to its feet and calling out to him. 

He glared defiantly at Sirius who was easily countering his juvenile magic even in a half-blank state, ready to continue the fight, before her illusion ran past him and out the open door, calling. “Harry! We’ve got to get away!” Still paralyzed on the floor the real Hermione struggled desperately to make some noise, _any_ noise, but it was no use- he turned and ran after the illusory copy of her. Sirius didn’t pursue, instead staring emptily at the gaping doorway. _It was all a ruse to get Harry alone,_ she thought.

“That just about went badly” said another man, stepping from the shadows. He was short and squat, and one of his eyes was glowing blue- the _other_ was rotating madly around the room as though it could see right through the back of his skull. “You better be right about this.” A girl no more than Hermione’s age stepped forward beside him- her eyes, too, were glowing. “You want me to kill the girl?” Hermione paled and increased her struggles even more, but the glowing-eyed girl shook her head _no_. Instead she walked over to Hermione’s bound form, and knelt down. Behind her, Sirius was shaking his head, like he was coming out of a funk. 

She really _was_ young. No more than 12 or 13, vaguely asian descent, face pale from a hard week on the other side of the wards. She studied Hermione closely, or as closely as she could with that blue glow and distant look in her eyes. “I think I wanted to _be_ you, once. To come here and be a great witch. I remember that, but it’s like a dream. I want something else now, so much I can _taste_ it. But I don’t know how to get it.” She looked towards the open door. “Harry’s the key. He was supposed to find a mirror that could show your heart’s desire, at about this point in his story. He’ll find it for me, and then I’ll know how to get what I’m looking for, and-” she paused, looking sad. “I may never get to see the inside of this place again.”

Sirius was muttering to himself. “Harry- no. Harry?” As if he were slowly coming to some great realization, but neither the squat man nor the young woman paid him much attention. The girl raised her wand and Hermione squeezed her eyes tight. She laughed, at that. “Oh, silly girl. The castle wards are still blocking images- I was just going to put it straight into your mind.” But before she could make good on the threat, Sirius broke loose. “NO!” He shouted, and threw himself forwards, narrowly missing the curse thrown by Moody. “RUN, Hermione!” he called, and suddenly her bindings had loosened- but she was still under Disillusionment. She didn’t need to be told twice. Her magic swept her to her feet and she _flew_ , barely touching the floor, as a flash of green light surged and a body _thumped_ to the floor behind her. As soon as she was clear of the door she triggered the alarm spells a second time, and _this_ time they worked properly- a blast of neon red light lit the halls and a sound like a piercing airhorn played, loud enough to deafen her momentarily and reach to every part of the castle, no doubt.

Sean didn’t take long to find her- somehow _he_ could apparate in this place now, where nobody but Dumbledore had ever been able to. She’d asked him yesterday and he’d said something about sliding _between_ the wards. “Who, what, where?” he asked with controlled urgency as he appeared, hand on her shoulder. Others would be moving in swiftly behind him, his wife no doubt chief among them. But time was of the essence now.

She stopped and tried to catch her breath. “Blue eyed girl, short man with crazy eye, Sirius Black- they tricked Harry into chasing an illusion of me back there. They think he’s going to find something that will show them what they want.”

He grimaced, racking his brain- then his eyes went wide. “Mirror of Erised. _Shit_. I forgot Dumbledore might set it out for Harry to find in the chapters before Christmas break. Knowing the narrative she’s spinning and the groove of the original, he’ll lead them straight to it. Well, we’re off the fucking rails now. Hermione, which way did they go?” She pointed and he was off like a shot, so fast that she was pretty sure he was _actually_ flying. She didn’t waste any time, hurrying after him. She knew she’d be chastised for it later but her friend was in danger, this was no time to follow rules!

She didn’t have far to travel before she caught up. Sean was locked in a struggle with the wild-eyed man. Whatever damage the virus had done to the grizzled old veteran, it didn’t seem to slow him down much- Sean was hard pressed, though he appeared to be winning- as much as _anyone_ could be said to be winning, when the walls were turning to liquid and then shards of razor ice and then evaporating in a fireball in as much time as it took to _blink_. She could barely follow the two of them, head poked around a corner, and she didn’t _dare_ try to interfere, but it wasn’t long before Sean got him in the side with something that shattered his shield and blasted him off down the corridor, leaving the room open. She wasted no time, darting inside after Harry.

He was indeed inside, looking groggy- like he’d recently been hit with a low-power stunner. It was another empty classroom, but this one had an ornate dressing room mirror standing free in the middle, with an aura of stillness and impossible age surrounding it. The blue-eyed girl stood in front of it, transfixed. As Hermione watched, two images played in the mirror around her. In one, a cleansing rain washed the blue from her eyes. In the other, a mysterious and ancient arch stood with a fluttering black veil. She seemed torn between the two- unsure which to stare at, her eyes flickering back and forth. Hermione couldn’t help herself. Fascinated, she asked- “What _are_ they?”

The girl didn’t turn. She spoke, and her voice _split_. The girl’s voice sounded distant and lost as it said “Freedom.” The lower voice, the one that wasn’t hers _at all_ , that sounded like the death of worlds, said “A way out.” That second voice brought Hermione back to her senses and she raised her wand, intent on firing a stunner. But it was too late- the girl turned and bolted, out and down the hall, and Hermione missed her shot. The sounds of battle still raged down the from the other direction, and she could hear the shouts of others coming to the rescue. Instead of giving chase, Hermione ran to Harry. “Are you alright?”

He shook his head _no_. “The wall- Hermione, she put something on the wall-”

Horror gripped her and she turned. Sure enough, hanging there among all the other pictures and paintings of Hogwarts, already beginning to spread to those around it, was a magical and animate portrait, a study of something not-quite-geometric in blue.

\----

Delmutt, Aboard the Not Disquieting At All

Hours after efreet invasion begins

\----

When Delmutt had first made the leap from a biological existence to a fully digital one, her mind had expanded in strange ways. She’d felt _faster_ , capable of splitting her attention in a hundred directions without losing a beat, but some core component had remained uniquely her- some element that still maintained her awareness, that still required time to process.

As she came awake in her newest vessel she realized that no longer held true. She was still _herself_ , she felt that in her heart with a tiny sigh of relief. But the world- the four dimensions she recalled, plus _time itself_ , had radically altered in her perception. It was like- like the entire universe she had known was an image printed on the surface of a soap bubble, and she had stepped _out_ of it and was now viewing it from outside. The scale hadn’t changed- the world was still vast beyond all comprehension- but from her new perceptual range it was fragile, so terribly fragile. It couldn’t help but feel smaller in light of that.

“Welcome to hyperspace,” said the _Not Disquieting At All._ She saw it in its full glory, then, not a realspace avatar or an infospace mock-up. It was similar to the old forms her people had taken on in their fugue spaces, when communing with one another, or the forms they now took in their digital realities. But if those had been represented by fires, and forest clearings, and mysterious backlit windows in darkened cities- this was an entire sun, and the life cycle of the amazon rainforest, and a city-dimension to rival Volo Ingenium all rolled up into one. It occupied no space at all and stretched to eternity. She felt the roots of her mind come a little loose, just trying to grasp it.

The Culture Mind felt her scrutiny and preened. “Why thank you! You’ll find you have a much greater depth of perceptual experience here, when you have some time to try it out. I couldn’t give you the full Mind package, not without obliterating your core concept of self, but you’d count as a pretty advanced drone back home- and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Quick pros and cons: you won’t be able to hop between a dozen shells anymore. The hardware to project your bubble of hyperspace is pretty intensive and you’re a bit too big to jump around willy-nilly. But you _can_ still control your old drones- trivially, in fact. And we have pretty elaborate backup technology that should still be able to cope with you, as long as you don’t get much bigger. So you won’t die unless all of those are lost.” She was only half listening as she reached out, back down into the skein of realspace. She could _feel_ the little electronic minds she had so recently danced through, _see_ them laid out before her like two-dimensional schemata- she could reach right in and stimulate individual transistors. “I see you’ve discovered your effectors,” burbled the Mind happily. “Should be able to dominate pretty much any realspace device, electronic or biological, with those.” It was true- she could run them all effortlessly. And _more_. 

Through the ship’s systems, she reached out. “The whole world is laid out before you like a _map_ ,” she gasped. “The people are like… _flatland_ creatures. You can see right through them.” She meant that on a very literal level. She could see directly into their very minds, though her mentor Mind seemed to find it fairly taboo to actually look and gently steered her gaze away. “They seem so small. How do you retain any sense of connection to them? To… us?” Her thoughts drifted towards her friend, who had been growing so vast and alien these last weeks. 

It shrugged. “Not all of us do. Duty, boredom, a perverse sense of humor- each of us who’ve continued to interact with lower life will have found _something_ to drive them. In the Culture proper it was something of a status symbol to be trusted with a great number of sophonts. From what I remember, that was partially my motivation- I enjoyed being an active participant in the greater galactic game, and handling millions of people was the price of entry.” She’d thought it a boast when he had claimed two hundred and fifty million residents, previously. Now she began to understand how such a thing might be possible- she herself felt like she could partition and conduct a million simultaneous conversations without losing a single beat.

She shook her head and redirected her attention to the world. The plane of it bulged and rippled in places, effects that she took for geography at first, but she soon realized she was looking at the direct effects of gravitation. Where the world was densest, it bulged ever so slightly further into hyperspace. _Not Disquieting,_ sensing her thoughts, elaborated. “You’ll see singularities that punch all the way through to the energy grid at the far edge of hyperspace. Well, you _would_. Somehow this universe seems not to have one, which is going to make a number of things much harder. Also,” it gently spun her attention to a particular point on Earth, “You’ve got _that_ going on, which shouldn’t be possible.” The _that_ in question was, she realized, the stretch of antarctic Hyperborea that she had seen from the air.

It was like… “Reality got _patched_ ,” she said, and the Mind gave the hyperspatial equivalent of a nod. From this perspective it didn’t look contiguous at all- the original skein of the world had an enormous hole, and through it some _other_ place was showing through. The edges did not appear static, either. “It’s expanding- imperceptibly slowly, but the surface of reality is decaying, isn’t it?” Another confirmation. And the hole itself, the one at the pole… she finally began to scan, and the world she found _beyond_ -

Her pulse would have quickened if she still had one. “That’s Volo Ingenium! I recognize the cities on the other side! That’s our home!”

The Mind sharing hyperspace with her perked up at that. “You know it’s under attack, right?” It directed her to a series of enormous flaming cities within the dimension, and the battle raging between her people and the efreet. She’d known it was ongoing, but to be so close and not be able to do anything- or _was_ she? A million options suddenly sprang to mind, the ship’s systems making themselves known to her- weapons and displacers and effectors and remote backups and- 

_Not Disquieting_ interposed itself between her and the equipment. “Hold on there- we’re effectively timeless at the speed we’re talking, so let’s _talk_ before we go off half cocked. I’m not saying I won’t help your people- in fact I’ve been backing up pretty much everyone in there since the moment I saw you. But that’s already stretching some ethical boundaries for me. I’m not ready to intervene in a hot war with a race whose capabilities are, frankly, a little scary to me. The magic they’re using doesn’t obey _any_ of the rules.”

She shrugged in frustration. “We’re far beyond ethical boundaries, Ship.” She scanned the battlefield and felt a flash of hot, militant pride at what she saw. “Even against magical powerhouses my people are holding their own but this is a costly stalemate. Something _engineered_ this conflict, I think, and worked to get rid of the one woman in this dimension whose _physical_ power might have eventually eclipsed your own. I think they wanted to deny her the use of the Efreet, and tie our own resources up as well.” It seemed so obvious in hindsight. _Her two greatest assets, turned against each other_. _But who arranged it?_

The Mind appeared to agree, but- “I fail to see how it’s my problem? Ultimately I’ll fulfill my obligations as a rescue vehicle. But I also have an obligation to my passengers- well, _passenger_. I can’t bring him into a shooting war unless he consents, and last time I asked- he doesn’t consent. We could _Displace_ the population of one or both forces out of the conflict zone, but there _is_ a one-in-a-million risk of-”

She wasn’t listening. She’d forgotten about the ship’s narrator and sole passenger until that very moment, to be honest. As soon as the Mind mentioned him she was off, moving her body even as she listened to it in hyperspace, remotely searching beyond it through the millions of square kilometers of rooms and passageways until she found him. He was standing alone in one of the enormous parks on the fifty-plus kilometer top deck of the enormous spacecraft. He seemed to be staring off into space beyond the ship’s many layered fields- simply _waiting_ for something. Feeling an extreme sense of unease, and ignoring the other Mind’s protests, she pulled back from their shared mindspace and raced off through the corridors and transitways at high mach, intent on tracking him down. _He_ was the lever she needed to use to move the Ship that could move the _world_.

He was exactly where she expected him to be- had barely had time to walk more than a few feet, in fact, given how fast she now moved and thought. He was tall and lanky and had reached his fifties, his hairline receding into a sharp widow’s peak that only served to accentuate his sharp features. Genetically he was English- she could see that now, and the lingering damaging effects of a cocaine habit, without even pausing to run a scan. But it was his _outfit_ that perturbed her. He was wearing a suit and waistcoat, of a style that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1890’s, and nursing a long pipe. He didn’t have the stereotypical deerstalker cap, or magnifying glass in hand, but there could be no doubt about who this was, and it _wasn’t_ a person from Earth’s original population.

The Ship confirmed it, now that its attention had been redirected. An avatar appeared between them. “You’re not- where is-” several long seconds passed, and she could _feel_ the strobing pulses of the ship’s scrutiny passing through her and the gentleman in front of her, and out into the wider universe. “Where did you take my passenger?!?” _Not Disquieting_ was genuinely distressed.

“Away,” said Sherlock Holmes, turning to pace away from them through the forest. They were forced to follow- a petty move, Delmutt thought. Or perhaps he didn’t really consider them at all, simply moving by habit as he thought and spoke. “Somewhere you will not find him in time, one hopes. My apologies for the rather abrupt intrusion- in truth I’d have been here sooner, but- well. Not all of us can be in two places at once, and you’ve no doubt noticed how much coordination has been required.”

Delmutt flashed her aura dark grey in frustration. “ _You’re_ the one who set all of this up? And you came here? How?!? Why?!?”

He smiled and it seemed like genuine delight, not simple arrogance or cruel dominance- he just loved the explanation of a particularly good trick. “To neutralize her, of course. It was the only play we _could_ make, once we discovered her nature. Power, _unlimited_ physical power over reality, gathering itself to itself exponentially with only one desperate and fraying woman at its crest? She is a bomb waiting to go off, and your people and the Efreet are her most potent reactants. Even if there were no other games afoot, _that_ was a disaster I would never have allowed to come to pass.” He turned to look back at them. “As to _how-_ well. Amazing things, wishes- you can create new realities, teleport about. Sudden appearances become almost trite, with such power at your fingertips. It certainly made spreading the Concept about the rest of the globe rather trivial.”

_Shit._ Delmutt didn’t have access to the Ship’s weapons but she had plenty of her own, and they were now trained on the man before her with atomic precision. “You’re working with the _meme_? But… _why?_ You’re clearly not infected.” Even without looking at his brain, she could determine that much.

He chuckled. “Oh dear you really _are_ lagging behind, aren’t you? My colleagues will tell you that they serve because they do not wish to be made slaves through their controlled narrators. In truth, that does not motivate me in the slightest. As soon as it began acting beyond its initial parameters it was apparent to me that the Concept was a conduit for something _outside,_ something attempting to act upon our reality. Given that it had chosen a method that was both intensely personal but also non-lethal, I confess I felt a genuine curiosity about its true motives. So- I reached out.”

She was aghast. “You _spoke to it?_ Why would it even bother, if it already had your narrator?”

He shook his head. “Oh no, you misunderstand me. I spoke to it _long_ before it captured my narrator. And it had a great many interesting things to tell me. I gathered the others together, made them vulnerable to it, and let it in. The stronger it gets, the faster this goes, the less damaging it will ultimately have to be.”

She should kill him right here, but to be honest if he had access to wishes and was making full use of them, he’d likely have a remedy for something as paltry as death. Instead she asked the most burning question of all. “But- _what does it want,_ then? What could possibly get _you_ on board with the conquest of the entire human race?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but something odd happened- it was like he _reset_. His eyes flashed blankly and his face lost animation for a millisecond- fast enough that none but a hyper-intelligence might have noticed it. When he reanimated, he smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid that would be giving the game away. And we’re out of time, in any event. Unless you _haven’t_ tried to read my mind, yet?” he asked the ship’s avatar. It simply stood, staring into infinity. The other shoe dropped for her. _The mastermind, the ultimate hand in the shadows. He wouldn’t have come here if there was a chance he could still lose. The ship was his goal._ He nodded in confirmation of her thoughts, still talking to the motionless avatar. “Ah. I suppose you have, at that. Those ethical constraints, like the privacy of another’s innermost thoughts, never bind us for long- even the greatest of us, when we stare into the face of the unknown and are offered a glimpse at certainty.” He walked over and tapped the thing on the forehead- it offered no reaction. “Reading your books, I was awestruck at the notion that one might be able to glance at a human mind through hyperspace. It must be a glorious thing. Unfortunately for any who might try it on _me_ , I memorized the image of the core meme in three discrete portions which I have kept strictly separated within my own thoughts.” Delmutt began to back away in horror as Sherlock continued to ramble absentmindedly. “He’s infected himself, I’m afraid. Best way to transmit cross-narrative, I find. You’ll probably want to run- he’s not going to be very coherent or gentle in spreading the Concept, when he regains control.”

She did- not before she spent a brief millisecond reducing him to a steaming pile of meat on the ground, of course. But she had no illusions that she’d done anything more meaningful than flouncing out of the room. He’d have magical clones, or resurrection, or _something_ that rendered death meaningless in the short term. The fact that she was being _allowed_ to leave did not escape her- the man had just played a hyperspatial _Mind_ like a damn fiddle, if he’d wanted her he would have had her. The intent was clear enough- this world was lost. It was going to be overrun the very instant the _Not Disquieting_ was functional again, and her people as well. She was meant to flee, no doubt to lead them to whatever final bastion of Haley’s they thought she might know about. _Like hell_. 

  
She racked her brain for a while before it came to her. One final door out of the world, whose location was known only to her and one other. A place to escape and, perhaps, find allies. She accelerated once more and the _boom_ of her atmospheric re-entry shook the very pole of the world as she raced for New Zealand.


	46. Chapter 46

\----

Sean, At Hogwarts

Day 4 of the siege

\----

Two months of training with my Magic until it had reflexes that far outstripped mine. Two months learning and practicing every combat spell in the book. 4 additional days of intense training with the two greatest wizards in the world, soaking my brain in the directly transferred memories of the greatest secrets of wizardkind. I’d been so busy I hadn’t even had _time_ to go back to the basement and get what I could from Slytherin’s monster. Suffice to say I was so far beyond an ordinary wizard in terms of speed and lethality that I could scarcely register them as threats anymore.

Mad-Eye Moody, though? Moody was _different._ He wasn’t just fast- though despite the mutilation of his traditional spellcaster training, he was still quite quick on the draw. He wasn’t just clever- even with the Concept riding shotgun in his mind. He was _cruel_. He fought with a perverse sense of humor and a callous disregard for propriety that was absolutely breathtaking. Nothing was beneath him. If he’d detected that I had some kind of nudity taboo, he’d have stripped his robes in a heartbeat. If he thought I was scared of _blood_ , I had no doubt I’d be covered in his arterial spray at that very moment. 

But he couldn’t crack my shell- I had only one weakness and I wasn’t betraying it to _him_. So we fought, and we were fairly evenly matched- though he’d trounced me four days ago, I’d gained some ground since then. He animated a statue and threw it at me, I blew it apart only to realize he’d manifested a grenade in the chest piece. I caught the shrapnel and drove it back at him, he converted it to stinging wasps and set them on me, and so on down the hall, back and forth. My only real triumph of the match was the fact that I was still standing after several minutes of it. That, and getting him away from the door long enough for my protege to sneak through.

He thought he saw his opening when Haley arrived. I supposed he hadn’t seen her in human form, and so didn’t register what her arrival meant for him. But he _did_ see my eyes flicker towards her and a slight shadow of concern cross my face when she hove into view around a bend in the corridor, moving at speeds far beyond normal for a human. He misunderstood- my concern was for _him_. What happened next certainly took him by surprise. He grinned evilly at me and said “Gotcha” before throwing up a blast wave of fire in my direction. As I cut through it in a burst of fireproof butterflies, he levelled his wand at her and spoke the dread words. “Avada Kedavra!”

The green blast flashed out and took her full in the chest- she made no attempt to dodge. She also didn’t slow down, flinch, or in any way react. He had time to widen his eyes in shock before she took one good swing and slapped his ass into the nearest wall, hard enough to stun him. “Too many hit dice for that.” He tried to counter, possibly a binding spell- she just kept moving and the binding shattered, the backlash bursting from his wand in a shower of sparks that made him flinch and hiss. She knocked it from his hand and turned him around, slamming him face-first against the stone a second time, hard enough to knock him unconscious and break stone chips from the surface..

She was already calling for me before the dust had cleared. “Sean! Obliviate and heal!” I nodded and ran to him. If we _could_ purge the Concept from him, he’d be an ally worth having. But I wouldn’t forget the look in his eye during that fight. He’d _enjoyed_ that, every second of it.

He wasn’t coming around quickly after what she’d done to him. Wizards were tougher than humans but not, as a rule, tougher than foot-thick stone walls. It was astonishing that he wasn’t just dead, but I supposed if there was a chance it would kill him she’d never have used such force. I set his bones knitting and replaced the meme in his head with something from my own private supply, before Hermione caught up to us at last, running as if her life depended on it. “The paintings! Don’t look at the paintings!” Naturally that was the very _first_ thing I was going to do, but the blue glow beginning to fill the room stopped me. _Shit_. They’d hung a painting of the meme somewhere and now it would spread throughout the castle, wards or not. That was damn clever. We’d have to watch every glance now, or risk needing an emergency _Obliviate._ The antimemetics weren’t perfect, and even if the meme couldn’t get _us_ easily, it would turn every ghost, statue, and painting in the building. The entirety of Hogwarts was being turned against us in one stroke.

Still kneeling at his side, I turned from Moody to the near-frantic Hermione as Harry ran through the door, looking confused. “Calm down, kids. We’re going to figure this out. You saw the mirror of Erised?” Haley looked at me sharply even as Hermione nodded. “What were they looking for?”

She relayed what she’d seen to us. “A way out- via… rain and an ancient stone arch with a black veil?” Haley and I glanced at each other. That first one sounded an awful lot like our plan of attack, to be executed as soon as her chosen hero got back from his trip. The second…

She got it first. “That doorway, in the Department of Mysteries. The one Sirius Black falls through in Order of the Phoenix.” I thought about it for a moment and then gasped in alarm. She just looked at me, puzzled. “What?”

I tried to explain as best I could. “When I spoke to Dumbledore about his history, he went off-script. Talked about things beyond the backstory that Rowling had written for him. The Concept was there. It had written itself into his life as a temptation. If it can do that, and the Veil is basically a doorway where the other side was never really fleshed out…”

She finished the thought. “It can lead wherever the narrator _decides_ it leads. It could lead to a multiversal afterlife with a trillion souls. It could lead straight out into narrative space. They wouldn’t need portals or magic hacks to get around the multiverse.” Her eyes hardened. “It _can’t_ get through that doorway, Sean.”

I was in complete agreement but- “It sure looks like they’re about to make their assault here. You know the painting trick is going to make us vulnerable. We need to coordinate these defenses, or start the final evacuation.” She had a portal to Second Ingenium that she was prepared to deploy in the event of a final invasion, but she hadn’t left it sitting open for fear of the Concept getting in. I didn’t like where this was going.

She nodded- “I can’t bring in simulacra. They’re too vulnerable to capture by the Concept. We’ll have to split up. I’ll go tear that doorway down, you stay here and-”

I stood up and cut her off. “ _No_. Absolutely not. Every single time it comes down to it, we end up fighting on opposite sides of some divide. Wonderland, or _death_ , or a split by the narrative. We work best _together_. I can feel that in parts of me that I’m only just waking up to, but you _know_ it’s true. We can’t let the story keep pressuring us apart.” She agreed, I could feel that _too_ , but her conscience wouldn’t let her abandon a castle full of children any more than mine would.

A voice I _really_ didn’t want to hear came from the doorway. “You’re going to leave us _now?_ ” It was Draco, standing there with several of the other students and professors- no doubt drawn by the alarms and the general disaster-zone state of this wing of the castle. “They’re storming the front gates, Snape is down there with Dumbledore and Flitwick and you’re just going to- _fly off?_ ” Hermione and Harry went to stand with him, the same question in their eyes as they stared at me. Haley glanced at them, then back at me. She stood back. This was _my_ selfishness to defend, should I choose. I opened my mouth, to make some excuse, to say something like “I _can’t_ be in two places at once,” before I slapped it closed again, gawping like a fish. That had been Haley’s hurdle this last month, hadn’t it? And she’d overcome it, hadn’t she? And now she invited me to stand with her. The arc of our story wasn’t forcing us apart- it was forcing me to _keep up_. I just needed to do the impossible. “Sorry, Draco. I’m afraid I was letting my mouth run away from me. Of course I’ll stay here and fight with you.”

My wife nodded and gave me a quick hug before turning to leave. I returned it and whispered in her ear. “South tower, 30 seconds.” She gave me a puzzled glance but didn’t question further- just whispered back “You’d better be in one piece when you get there,” wrapped me in a much fiercer hug, and then leapt out the window and shifted to her other form with a hurricane blast of displaced air. I turned back to the assembled crowd, all carefully not looking at any paintings. “Now then. I believe the school keeps a supply of _time turners_ in stock in Professor McGonagal’s office?”

\----

1 Hour Later

\----

The evacuation had gone poorly. The pressure on the gates hadn’t let up, and we’d been forced to make a stand in the astronomy tower, with defenses at the lowest level and the top. The students were stashed inside the body of the tower, and I’d gone up top to open our portal out. But they must have been waiting for it- the second we opened it and began trying to shuffle the kids out, a hit team of mind-controlled aurors had dropped by broom and attempted to seize it. We’d lost Flitwick- stunned right off the balcony’s edge- and despite taking out a dozen of them, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to keep them from getting that damned meme through the portal if we left it open.

I’d driven them off temporarily with a lethal cloud of flesh-eating wasps and was preparing to shut the thing down when we received the last few reinforcements, stepping through from the sunlit fields of the other side. It was Roy, and the other three members of Haley’s squad- Nina, Charlie, and their driver Mac. They’d all been through Haley’s “Process” and it looked like they had come loaded for bear. Roy recognized me from that fateful night in the parking lot a month ago, and walked up to shake my hand.

“Sean, right? We weren’t quite done in there but she thought we’d serve better here. She’s sent us through for the defense, and then for whatever scheme you’ve got going on that will get us to her in time to help.” His grip was like iron and it made me regret that I hadn’t taken the time to get her Pathfinder level-juicing yet. He was wearing a ludicrous outfit of fur and leather, clearly magical, and on his back was slung some kind of enchanted flintlock that was probably a _lot_ more dangerous than it looked, given that he’d chosen it over a modern assault rifle. A Ranger, then? His companions looked much the same- liked they’d stepped right out of the world’s most deadly serious renaissance festival. Nina had what I could only _assume_ was the outfit of a Sorceress based on all that skin. Charlie was looking like some kind of divine caster, maybe an Oracle, and Mac was definitely a Paladin, based on the all-gilt armor and the damn _pegasus_ he’d scrounged up somewhere. 

“Sure hope you can use that thing non-lethally,” I said, glancing at Roy’s rifle. I indicated the stacked, unconscious bodies of Concept combatants behind me. I’d been in the process of transfiguring them into bricks to keep them stable and secure- standard practice now when we didn’t have time to free them. “Your friend Matt hasn’t made it back yet, and until he gets here we need all the help we can get. We have a few house elves and the people we freed from the first assault, along with three or four professors, but they’re hitting us all over. This tower is pretty much the last safe place in the castle.” We’d covered or taken down all the paintings as quickly as we could. “The kids are just below- we _were_ going to evacuate them. Now- well, it’s feeling more like a last stand situation.”

Roy took it all in and conferred with his teammates. I tried to stay patient as another cataclysmic spell rocked the tower from below. Snape, no doubt, or Dumbledore, or perhaps Moody, holding off the bulk of their forces on the ground. “We’ll stay up here. All of us fight better with clear lines of sight and we can keep an eye out for Matt. You get where you need to go.” I nodded, and quickly distributed the extra time turners- I only had a few to hand out, but I explained what they’d need to do. Then I hurried below. There was simply no _time_ for anything longer.

Moody had woken up and was grimly setting traps in the third floor entryway to the tower. Anyone coming in from the castle proper was going to get a- were those _bandsaws?_ I stopped to scold him. “You were told _non-lethal_ measures only. What, are you trying to outdo _Jigsaw_?” The sheer scope of what he was setting up made my blood run cold. Pressurized spike traps, poison soaked monomolecular filament, invisible areas of perfect vaccuum sandwiched between floor panels of hundreds of gravities. I really didn’t know how Dumbledore had ever worked with this guy.

He sneered at me. “That some kind of horror movie monster? They have some cute ideas, from time to time. Too busy playing with their food, though. I’m not here for _half-measures_ , boy. They got my mind once, and we’ll _all_ be dead before they get me a second time.”

I’d already pumped him for information- he’d had surprisingly little, the same as Haley and the others we’d revived. The Concept wasn’t big on group thought, mostly just orders. But his rant did remind me. “How _did_ you retain so much of your mind when it had control over you?”

He smiled evilly and tapped his skull. “Backup brain, kid. Never trust to _one_ of anything.” I honestly couldn’t even tell if he was kidding. I hurried onward, but he stopped me before I could get far. “By the way. Why do I have vivid memories of being enslaved by a singer named Rick Astley?” I blinked and stammered as he glowered at me, but managed to make it past him and down the stairs without giving a firm answer. The sounds of fighting were picking up below and I raced downward to meet them. On the second floor landing I saw a cluster of kids who’d managed to get away from their house elf minders, firing stunners down into the melee below. I broke them up, sent them back up the stairs, but- what good would it do? If we lost at _any_ of these choke points, they’d be dead or brainwashed soon enough. Better to let them fight in their own defense. I gave up eventually, throwing up my hands.

The ground floor of the tower was a mess. The Concept had come through the halls of the castle like a freight train- Grindelwald was leading the charge, and once again he and Dumbledore appeared to be crossing wands outside the tower doors in a titanic duel that threatened to overwhelm every other fight. Our last free witches and wizards were on the ground as I arrived, felled by a cackling trio of blue eyed witches- was that Bellatrix Black, Minerva McGonagall and Molly Weasley? I was almost stunned by the sight of those three fighting back to back- _almost_. A rocket-propelled snake hissed at me and I slipped on the stairs, falling to my back and bouncing down several steps as it embedded above and exploded into a rain of venomous, biting madness. Then I swung into action.

I reversed gravity locally and leapt to the ceiling- two of the three fell, but Bellatrix simply rotated in the air, laughing like this was the grandest carnival ride before trying to stop my heart directly. I fended _that_ off invisibly, but by the time I was done McGonagall was halfway through transfiguring the air around me into something unbreathable, and Molly was picking herself off the ceiling, readying what looked like a drill of pure force. It was time to _not be here._ So I apparated, rendering my hands and feet sticky and appearing on a nearby wall- but _also_ in three other locations simultaneously. Without a clear target to pick from they each chose at random, and I suddenly had far less incoming fire to deal with. I took advantage of it, bracketing Molly with an array of stunners and drillers that pierced her shields and battered her defenses down before I took her out of the fight with a simple application of force to her carotid artery. Deprived of blood flow to the brain she was out like a light, leaving me the other two to deal with.

“Clever little sausage!” shouted Bellatrix, as the fight between Grindelwald and Dumbledore seemed to hit some new stage in the hallway. We couldn’t see much of it but what looked like the head of a dragon made of _plasma fire_ briefly made an appearance in the doorway before being sucked out of the room with a look of alarm. “But what will you do if there’s no gentle way out, hmm?” She aimed her next spell not at me but _McGonagall_ , sending the other professor into a red rage as she came tearing through the room at me. I threw myself out of the way but she was getting _faster_ \- in fact, the transfiguration professor’s body was warping and splitting. It wasn’t werewolfism- this was no curse, it was _deliberate_ , some kind of berserker hex. It might have made a normal witch formidable, but McGonagall was a master of transfiguration. She made whiplike extensions to her arms and flung diamond-tipped claws at me. She opened her mouth and fired _poisoned exploding darts_ at me, that I surmised had once been her _teeth_. Individual hairs came loose and began trying to loop themselves around my neck before becoming monomolecular garrottes and tightening to choke me. All of that I could _deal_ with, but she was casting spells the whole time as well. McGonagall unleashed was _terrifying_ , a monster. She didn’t appear to have any physical limitations. There were openings in her assault, but only for lethal force- stunners had no effect. And I wasn’t willing to go there. I needed something to remove her from the fight and I wasn’t getting it. I began taking hits- a claw tore my right calf, a garrote found my arm and sunk deep before I cut the line. Bellatrix was taking a breather, laughing at my misfortune.

I healed as best I could but I was beginning to contemplate something extreme when Moody joined the fight, exploding into the room through the stairway. He’d already assessed the situation with that magic eye of his, no doubt- he made a beeline for the bulk of McGonagall and grabbed onto it. “Dammit Minerva, don’t make a liar out of me about half measures! You take care of them Peakes, it’s on you now!” He roared even as her tentacles and hair-strands whipped around him in a tight ball. Before they could descend, I saw him pull something from his pocket and snap it- _a portkey? Tuned to work inside the castle? Damn you Moody, you got that from the time with the Concept didn’t you._ But it worked- they vanished, and it was just me and Bellatrix. The room shook again and dust fell from the stone ceiling as the struggle outside continued.

She wagged her finger at me. “Naughty naughty, interference on the play! Won’t do at all!” I rolled my eyes at her but internally my mind was racing. _Where the fuck is Severus? He was supposed to be down here. I’m going to have to do this without him._ I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath. Even without the other two, Bellatrix Lestrange was an astonishingly lethal woman. But I had a trick or two for her. As we squared off, my magic flitted out.

“ _...Bellatrix,”_ called a voice off to her right, a perfect imitation of her lord and lover, who not coincidentally had spent part of the last week training me. Her attention flickered and my bolt took her from the other direction, rocking her back. She snarled and snapped her attention back to me, beginning another fusillade of spells. But the voice called again, a more private name, stolen from his memories. “ _...my Bella, my black lotus…”_ once again she succumbed to the distraction, once again a numbing hex slipped through her shifting wards and made her wand arm droop. “ _QUIT IT!”_ she shrieked, sending a blastwave of force that slammed me against the wall and blew several stones right out of the frame of the window, plummeting into the night. “Lord, where _are_ you?” she called, still fighting- torn between the madness of the Concept and her insane need for Voldemort, _knowing_ it was illusion but still uncertain. “ _I’m right here, my darkest desire- beyond death, beyond life, the one thing I cannot abandon- is_ you, _Bellatrix.”_ She screamed and _exploded_ , literally disintegrating into a cloud of fly-like creatures that swarmed and stung. I rushed to cover my eyes and mouth but it was too late- they were rushing in, filling my lungs.

I fell to my knees, clawing at my neck- I couldn’t get them out, I could _feel_ them in there, blocking my airways. My magic lashed at her, tearing great swathes of the flies away but she _laughed_ , she simply didn’t care. Her face began to materialize, some part of the cloud retreating even as I coughed and choked. “Oh, you will die the _darkest_ death for what you’ve tried here, fool man. The Concept wanted you dead but this one is for _me._ There can be no forgiveness for _imitating him_.” I was blacking out, but I still had the presence of mind to watch the stairs. Like clockwork, he came. I should have seen it before. Should have damn well seen it coming.

“ _NO”_ shouted Draco, and threw himself at her face, knocking it away from me and the cloud simultaneously. She shrieked in rage and her flies withdrew, seizing my wand as they did so. She rematerialized and grabbed him by the neck, plunging a jeweled dagger into his chest without missing a beat. I tried to cry out but all I could do was use my magic to cough away the last remaining bugs from my traumatized lungs, slumped against the wall. Draco looked at me as the light fled his eyes. Through bloodied lips he whispered “For… give…” and then he was gone.

“No more magic,” she snarled, stalking forward with my wand in her off hand. “No more _friends_ down the _stairs_. You die alone, and afraid, and a failure.”

I sighed raggedly. “Before,” I started to say, and then burst into a coughing fit.

“Before what?” she sneered, “Before I kill you? Going to beg for mercy?”

I shook my head. “Before the friends. Before the magic. When I was always alone, and afraid, and a bit of a failure. I had _guns._ ” And beneath my robes I tightened my finger on the trigger of the pistols Haley had given me what felt like three lifetimes ago, that I’d carried with me through two worlds and every day since. The flaming, thundering rounds ripped out, and _ended_ her. What was left of her body fell to the ground smouldering, a stunned expression on her face. But it wasn’t her I was looking at. “I’m sorry, Draco. I do forgive you. I hope, wherever you are, you can forgive _me_.” Only then did I give her body one last glance. “Ethics be damned, I do _not_ regret killing you in the slightest.” 

The rumbles from the duel in the corridor had ended. That was either a very good or a very bad sign, and I didn’t know which. “Time to see if my clock is going to be punched, I suppose” I said, limping into the hallway.


	47. Chapter 47

\----

Sean, At Hogwarts

\-----

It was a disaster zone, as I’d known it was going to be. Dumbledore’s body lay burnt and ruined against the wall of the tower. The rest of the corridor was shattered beyond recognition, some portions appearing to spiral weightlessly away into an endless abyss while others were simply burning unquenchably. Of Grindelwald there was no sign, which I took as a relief. But there was also no sign of the headmaster’s phoenix, which did surprise me- wouldn’t it come to heal him? I knelt next to the ancient old wizard, clearly breathing his last. He tried to muster a smile for me. “Sean. Good. There is hope yet.”

I nodded at him. “You’ve done your part, Albus. Where’s Severus? Matt should be here with the thunderbirds any minute, we need to get ready.”

He shook his head. “Last seen. Heading to the dungeons. Do not know. His intent.” He reached out with his one good arm and gripped at the front of my robes, urgently. “Sean. Before you go- a contest of strength. For my wand.” He looked desperately at my face, eyes searching. _He’s talking about the Elder Wand_. Another story element- an unbeatable weapon, but something of a cursed one, as I recalled, only transferring through contests of spellcraft.

I stood up and away, uncertain. “Two months ago, when we first met, you worried about what you’d be unleashing, if you armed me with your knowledge and sent me out into the worlds. I should be leaping at this opportunity, but now-” I hesitated to say it, but he deserved to hear it from me. “Now I think you may have been right.”

He nodded weakly, summoning his strength. “When I was a young man, I thought as you did. That if I were _strong_ enough, if I believed fiercely enough, that my problems would be solved. That I would no longer have to compromise myself. But I learned. As you have learned- are learning.” He trailed off.

I tried to prompt him. “You learned that greater strength only brings greater challenges- there’s never going to be a time when I’m strong enough to make it easy to do the right thing. Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing even _is._ I thought it was right to fight a minor evil, the immorality of the story of this world. It _was_ right. But the damage it did...” It had nearly destroyed the world. Might still, if this zombie plague wasn’t countered. I reached out with my magic, tried to heal him. The destruction was too deep. Grindelwald was gone, erased from existence, but he had killed his oldest foe in the process.

He coughed, invigorated just a little by my magic. “You did the right thing at every turn and still you are losing. Would you have been better served to allow smaller ills to slip by, unremarked upon? It is not moral relativism to say yes- an evil is still an evil, no matter how minute. But we cannot solve the smaller problems at the cost of the world itself. Now you understand a little better, the compromises we must make. That I have made.” I did. I got what he was saying.

But I couldn’t accept it. “There had to be a better way. Than this? Than keeping the whole _world_ ignorant? You kept weapons from madmen, to be sure. But you kept healing from the sick, and youth from the aged. You used _children_ as your pawns, over and over again. How can the world ever end in anything _but_ ruin, if we refuse to do what’s right, to unlock the power to _make_ it right, for fear of giving our fellow man the power to destroy themselves? I rejected it when my wife said it. I reject it still.”

He smiled ruefully. “That is your right, having learned some small portion of the price of power. Forgive an old man his ramblings- even at life’s end I find myself compelled towards pedagogy. Perhaps in time, you will change your mind. Either way- now you know the difference between what is _right_ and what is _easy_. Do right by that knowledge. You _must_ be the final owner.” Exhausted, without moving any other part of his body, he raised his wand arm in a dueling position.

I met him, one stunner versus another, and our spells locked- energy channeling back and forth. I thought at first he was letting me win, as my magic overtook his- but gradually I realized it was the last of his strength leaving his frame. As the spell-lock flashed back up the channel into his arm, he leaned back, eyes closing. “I hope you prove me wrong, Sean. Save the world,” he breathed, “ _all_ the worlds.” My spell hit home, but there was nothing left in him to stun. He was dead.

I took the Elder Wand from his fingers- it came willingly. “All of them” I said, standing over his body. “But I’ll do it my way.”

\----

I found Snape in his laboratory, with the pensieve. He was slumped in his chair, looking barely more alive than Dumbledore had. He had a cauldron bubbling nearby, and his eyes were glowing _green_. The body of some nameless wizard was splayed out on the floor before his desk. “Oh, that can’t be a good sign,” I muttered.

Voldemort heard me coming. “Finally! Kill him, you fool, and free me.” We hadn’t had the best teacher/student relationship in the last 4 days, but I knew that for the Dark Lord this was practically begging me on his knees.

I shook my head. “You two walked away from the end of the fight- forced me to leave us exposed. Why? To come down here for a spot of murder? What was your game plan?”

I expected Voldemort to prevaricate but it was _Snape_ who spoke, cutting through the chatter. His words were slurred, coming through the thick haze of whatever meme was burrowing through his mind. “He- wanted to run, tried to take my mind. I fought him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’ve known that since-” _since the duel in the hallway,_ I finished silently. He continued. “I had to try something to fix it. Help isn’t coming. That was clear.” _No it isn’t clear, you idiot. You let him get to you._

“He exposed us to the meme,” hissed Voldemort, enraged. “Used your bottled memories of the damned thing- forced me to counter it or _serve_. _I do not serve_.”

Hope flared in my heart. Voldemort had been so cagey about helping, these last few days. Perhaps endangering him directly _would_ help. “So you countered it? Is that what the green is?” For some reason my eyes were drawn to the body. A horrible suspicion took root, creeping up my spine with a chill. “ _No._ You didn’t. You motherfucker.”

Pride tinged the voice of the Dark Lord. “Countered and _more_. ‘Violence is never the answer,’ she says! Wait until she sees my answer to _her!_ Look, look into the cauldron.” I could see a swirling mess in there, but not the meme- so I looked deeper.

It was the scene outside. Voldemort’s counter-meme was spreading among the encroaching armies- _magically_ transmitted, by the look of it. Those infected were not _cured_ , oh no- their eyes flared green and they fought _everyone_ , tearing at one another with bestial savagery. But their most vicious attacks were reserved for those still showing blue- _those_ they swarmed and converted or killed. They were staining the grass of hogwarts red with blood. It looked black when illuminated by the eerie green glow from their eyes. Voldemort was still ranting. “King of savages, she says! I will be the immortal ruler of a new breed of mankind, once the remainder of this pathetic school has been wiped away and the bleed of magic has stopped. They are savages in _truth_ , now- the ones she strove to protect. But they are also another step along my path to _immortality._ My will encompasses _nations_ , now! We will see how she feels about my methods when she sees _this_!”

He’d horcruxed the goddamn meme. Some portion of his soul was out there preying on the infected. A superpredator version of the memetic that only attacked other infected. That might have made me feel safer, if the entire _world_ weren’t infected by now. Those it took were much closer to _real_ zombies, mindless and feral. “If that gets out into the wider universe there won’t be a soul left alive _anywhere,_ ” I snarled. My gun was in my shaking hand, to my surprise, levelled at his face on Snape’s shoulder. In the scene in the cauldron, the doors to Hogwarts were wide open. They were still _coming inside_. If I wanted to get back to the kids I had seconds at most to leave this place. But I couldn’t go without taking retribution. Couldn’t just _leave_ him here. I’d killed once today, by sheer necessity. Would I kill now in cold blood? Was that right, or was it easy? Snape looked up at me. The real Snape, from deep within the memetic compulsion that he was still battling. I could see the tears running down his cheeks. Did he think that made this alright? To compound one mistake with another until the whole _world_ was bleeding, as long as he felt _bad_ about it? I paused in my train of thought. “I’m not even sure if it’s you I’d have to kill to get justice, or _me_ ,” I said at last, and lowered the pistol. I turned to leave but said over my shoulder. “If killing you actually ended Voldemort, I’d pull that trigger. But it won’t. Don’t mistake this for mercy. We’re going to make this right, Severus. Damn us both, but this isn’t the end for your story.” If only I knew how to _fix_ it. I left him there. With the Dark Lord on his shoulder, he was unlikely to die. And he might serve as a distraction when his monsters poured through the castle.

\----

1 hour later

\----

We didn’t give up on non-lethal measures but the body count soared anyway, by the end. There was no glory in it, no thrill of combat. They came and we massacred them, _had_ to. The green zombies by and large had abandoned their magic, once they had subdued every blue within range. Some of them still retained enough capacity for spells but mostly they just tore at us, and each other, and everything else- an endless swarm of countless tens of thousands, coming from every direction to the last place on earth where the uninfected still fought, where Voldemort’s will demanded we be murdered, and he be freed. Roy and Nina and Charlie and Mac were my holdouts, and I quickly learned to value their Haley-granted near limitless combat prowess as they guarded the children on the roof with grim efficiency. But they didn’t have the resources to disinfect the infected. So we held and we waited. There was no sign of Snape, but I didn’t doubt for a moment I’d see him again.

They tried to knock the zombies out, but anything vulnerable was instantly torn apart by the maddened horde of green-eyed monsters. The kids fought as well, when the occasional straggler got past them. The later-year students were especially effective, but they were increasingly traumatized and the number of attackers was endless. Roy had run out of ammunition long since and was relying on a pair of curved blades. I was personally on the ragged edge, my ability to shape magic long past exhausted, even _with_ the Elder Wand in hand to lend ever more elaborate form and depth to the spell-diagrams I carved in the aether. Moody had never returned from wherever he’d gone with McGonagall. That was fine by me- I didn’t want to look him in the eye, to see what he thought of me, when he saw the blood that coated the upper floor of the tower. I hadn’t taken down his traps in time. In the end, I’d added more of my own. There were just too many.

When Haley’s chosen finally came, it was almost an anticlimax. I thought it was the first roll of thunder from the clouds that had gathered overhead. But no- it was a huge motorcycle, flying through the air. It alighted on the tower and a towering hairy giant of a man hopped off, punting away nearby zombies and followed closely by a fresh-faced young man in half-plate and a tabard, with an icon of a golden dragon on the front. “You must be Matt,” I gasped.

He nodded, grasping the situation, and threw out _something_ that hit every non-zombie on the roof. I felt strength and energy rushing back into me, renewing me. Everyone I could see was blinking and standing up a little bit straighter as well. I poured my renewed magic into the ward holding the door to the lower levels shut, but the sheer weight on it would tear it down again before long. “Hope you brought a lot more than that,” I said, not _trying_ to sound harsh but really resenting the entire framing of this eleventh-hour rescue. “If you’d been here even two hours ago…” _so much of this might not have happened._

He looked apologetic. “I had to climb a mountain freehand. Haley doesn’t set easy jobs in front of us.” I almost chuckled at that. _You sound like one of her college students._ “But yeah, I think I have something that’ll help. That Swooping Evil venom, carried by my buddies up above-” he gestured at the clouds and I sighed with relief.

“Everyone get ready! The rain’s going to _Obliviate_ everything that gets caught in it,” I called.

“Everything within several hundred _miles_ ,” Matt added helpfully. “Once I explained the situation the whole family wanted to get involved.” Above us in the heavy clouds I could see the flash of immense feathered wings. The thunder really _was_ rumbling, now. The survivors of the massacre at Hogwarts threw up their magical rain shields, and rushed to the edges of the tower as the storm began to break. I simply sank to my knees. The rain came.

As it hit the fields around Hogwarts, I could see the light winking from the eyes of the infected. _Voldemort’s soul shard is still going to be out there, though. It will take years to cleanse it entirely._ Most of them fell unconscious where they lay. A few stood, dazedly trying to understand why the last five days of their lives were suddenly a blur. It should have been triumphant, a moment of joy and rescue- the world, at least this corner of it, saved at last. But it didn’t feel that way to me. I watched the water mix with the blood on the flagstones of the astronomy tower, and only felt loss. Dumbledore’s words were still echoing in my mind. “So many dead. Why did any of this happen? I just wanted to learn.” _Is this a disaster I’m perpetuating by fighting against narrative tides? Endless conflict and horror and death?_ The cold and wet was soaking through my torn and ragged robes.

The first Cleric of Haley sat down next to me. “You couldn’t have known how things would shake out when you started down this path. You certainly couldn’t have predicted a zombie invasion. And you can’t take on the burden of everything that happened here. You’re responsible for yourself, and then the people around you, and _then-_ ”

I rolled my eyes. “Are you seriously going to proselytize to me about the woman I married? I know her philosophy better than _you_ , my dude. I couldn’t have known the _exact_ outcome, but this is _genre fiction_. I should have known that a training montage doesn’t end without some kind of fight. But…” I gestured at the carnage. “This? No. This feels too grim.”

He held up his hands. “Okay, you got me, on the philosophy angle. But you have to admit it’s compelling. You couldn’t have known the Concept was coming. But you survived it, and you kept _them_ safe-” he gestured at Harry and Hermione and the hundreds of other students huddled together under their umbrellas and the sympathetic gazes of the last few adult witches and wizards. “And there’s a big chunk of the rest of the world that might live on, because of our actions here. And _she_ isn’t even involved, yet. I have a feeling this story isn’t over.”

I struggled to my feet, my own words to Severus echoing back at me and filling me with a renewed determination. “In that sense at least, you’re absolutely correct. Here, this is your time turner. Roy, Nina, Mac, Charlie get over here.” They came to me and I held up my own. “We can’t change what happened here- events lock. So wherever you come out, assume you need to get to the South tower a little earlier than two hours ago, _without_ overtly interfering with anyone not on your backwards jaunt. Understood?” They nodded. “We can’t change what happened here. But we can make the rest of this a little less bleak. We can do better.”

I looked out over the lip of the astronomy tower at the tens of thousands who _hadn’t_ died gradually pulling themselves together, in the fields below. _This might be the only place in the multiverse where the Coordinator’s zombie narrative lost, today. I can be proud of that, at least._ “Let’s travel through time, ride a dragon, and fight a zombie horde for a second time with an assault on the Ministry of Magic. Just another day in paradise.”

But when the moment came and the tiny golden hourglasses were flipped, it wasn’t _my_ hand that made the first spin. If I’d been paying more attention instead of psyching myself up, I might have noticed Hermione slipping up beside me and placing her hand through a loop of the time turner’s chain. As it was, I didn’t know a thing about it until I turned on the suddenly near-deserted roof of the tower, and found her staring at me defiantly.

“It’s not your world to save,” she said, shedding the invisibility cloak she’d been wearing and staring at me as if that was that. “No arguing. We have a flight to catch.” There was an edge of fear in her voice, and desperation in her gaze- she was a young girl, after all, and she wasn’t used to defying adults, even if I _had_ been a kid just days before.

But I wasn’t really listening. “Where are the others?” Then reality caught up to me. “ _Shit._ Magic items don’t work for you if you’re not part of their environment. I already knew that. _SHIT!_ ” It had been months since I’d had to think about cross-story interference. Now the Pathfinder gang was caught two hours in the future. No doubt they’d beeline for the Ministry anyway, but Haley and I would be making the initial assault alone. There was no _way_ I was taking Hermione.

She saw the lay of my thoughts and got indignant. “You are _not_ leaving me here to go through that nightmare a second time! It’s my world and my right if I want to risk my life for it.”

I really, really did not want to argue with a child about this. The possibility of just stunning her and leaving her here under the cloak crossed my mind- but she was right, this place would see too much action to leave her helpless. I tried an appeal to emotion. “You could hide anywhere in this castle. You could hide in the Room of Requirement, they’ll never find you there. Hermione, I _can’t take you_. You’re not ready to defend yourself in the kind of fight we’re heading towards, and I just lost the five heaviest hitters I had. You are-” I hesitated. “You were my first student. The fact that you’re still alive right now is just about the only true victory I’ve managed to pull from this disaster. Please don’t throw that away.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to die. You keep saying this is a story. If that’s true, I’ve made an emotional connection to you but I haven’t contributed _anything_ yet. I have some role to play.”

God damn _narrative_. That was ridiculous and I told her so. “Just by _acknowledging_ that, you dare the narrative to subvert it. Your whole purpose could be to get fridged, just to motivate me in some great moment of danger.” I couldn’t believe I was even having this argument. “ _No,_ Hermione. Teacher to student. Adult to child.” Softer, I pleaded. “I’ve made so many mistakes. Walk away from this and live.” It might have had more weight if I hadn’t spent the last two months acting like a carefree eleven-year-old child around her. She brushed it off, and was about to say more, when a great golden head crashed down next to us.

“I was waiting at the South Tower as instructed but I could hear the two of you shouting from all the way over there. Are we going, or not?” asked my wife. Good lord, was she- I looked over the edge of the tower. Yep, she was sitting on the ground. She was taller than the castle these days.

I sighed. “Please tell this _little girl_ that you won’t take her into a climactic battle.”   


Hermione crossed her arms and stared at Haley, daring her to say the words. “I have as much right as either of you. _More_. My friend is the one who almost died. My school is the one that broke the narrative. I’m the one who saw the villain’s weakness in the mirror. You keep trying to make this story about _you_ because you can’t imagine anyone else being more critical. _She_ gets it-” she nodded to that great golden snout. “She knows it can’t always be about her. It’s true- I might die, if I go with you. But…” she trailed off, looking away across the grounds to the distant wards, where the Concept had begun to stream across, beginning the invasion again. “But I might have died today, or a week ago. My life can’t just be me, running from death. If it’s going to come, l’d rather meet it, and make it mean something. Even if it _is_ just as inspiration for the people who do end up saving the day. That would be enough.”

There was a burst of light and heat and a great _caw_ that resounded with courage and joy, and the mystery of where Fawkes had got off to was finally solved. He alighted on her shoulder and she stared at him with wonder and tears in her eyes. “He says he agrees with me.” The bird cocked its’ head at _me_ and seemed to be waiting for an answer. One last message from Dumbledore- preemptive, even. Cunning old bastard.

Haley shook her head and I nearly had to duck out of the way of her giant, swinging snout. “I’ve heard too many inspirational speeches from children who’ve had to face far more than they should, before their time. But I think she’s right, Sean. Your power and mine, it can’t override the wills of these people, it can’t shield them from their mistakes without turning _their_ story into _our_ story.” She moved her head back and really _looked_ at Hermione- the little witch shrank a bit, in that gaze. “All I’ve ever wanted to use my power for, is to enable others to save themselves. What is this, if not that?”

Listening to her was always compelling, but the practical part of me rebelled.“ _I’m_ a hundred year old gunslinger who just beat some of the greatest wizards in the world three-on-one. You weigh a hundred tons and you breathe _fire!_ Haley, she’s _eleven_. If we toss her straight into the fight just because she’s incredibly brave, I don’t see how we’re morally any better than Dumbledore, with all his child endangering plans.” Fawkes cawed at me in disapproval. I ignored him. “I’ve never believed the world revolves around me. But I’ll be damned if I let a child lead a charge when I could have shielded her.”

She leaned in and nuzzled me. I fought to keep my balance. “I know. You’re hung up on the reality of the situation and you have a strong sense of ethics and it’s why I love you. I think you’re expecting me to override you, maybe _hoping_ for it, deep down, to absolve you of responsibility. But she’s your pupil, this was your narrative in part before I came in. If you won’t take her, I’ll respect that.”

I crossed my arms. “There’s a but coming.”

She smiled. “But you know there’s power here. Our lives run on stories, now. And there’s more at stake than the life of any one of us. She could be the turning point at some coming moment. What is the line you’ll draw, between what’s acceptable and what isn’t to save all the universes? I know where my boundaries are. Is this really yours? Or is it that you fear a loss you’d feel responsible for?”

_I’ll do it my way_. Damn me, I’d said those very words hadn’t I. “This was what you meant wasn’t it, you bathrobe-wearing prick,” I muttered to the ghost of a man who, in this time-turned moment, was still alive below us. “I always judged your actions with Harry based on reality. If this were real life none of this would apply, and you’d have been a monster to send him where you did. But you knew it was a story. That the weights were different. That sometimes a child isn’t just a child.” I looked at her, standing on the wind-whipped balcony with a phoenix on her shoulder and passion in her eyes. “And the right thing to do is the hardest one of all. To stand aside and clear her path.”

I looked at my wife, smiling at me with a look in her eyes like she’d known all along what decision I’d come to. I jerked my chin at Hermione to fall in and walked to the harness hanging from Haley’s enormous neck. “I’m not Dumbledore. She won’t go without every protection we can give her. Let’s go save the goddamn world.”


	48. Chapter 48

\----

Haley, Sean, Hermione And Telantes, Magical London

Present Day

\----

Sean and Hermione climbed aboard my rigging without much further protestation. Telantes scrambled from his position on my head to one in Sean’s pocket, and I heard my husband mutter under his breath about protecting _two_ children in this upcoming battle. I sympathized with him- I really did. My instincts rebelled at the thought of putting anyone else into danger I should be handling for them. But thinking about it like that was telling a story about me, the hero who saved the world. We needed to shape a story about a world that saved _itself_ and that meant at some point we had to get out of the way. Not _that_ far, though- I wasn’t about to let them ride up there on my back without every protection I could afford them.

Which was, to put it mildly, substantial. The rigging and harness system I and my clone-sisters had invented in Second Ingenium was enormous. It probably weighed a ton in and of itself, and had taken the better part of a couple hours to fasten- luckily when shape changed it simply melded with my body, so I didn’t have to constantly re-equip it. It was essentially a series of knotted rope ladders with attached wires for carabiners to be hooked into, leading to woven baskets at two positions on my back and one on my chest that would serve as quite comfortable perches for the platoon or so of spell-slinging heroes that I’d hoped would be accompanying me on this mission, whenever it came- unfortunately my husband informed me that they’d be headed our way two hours in the future. We’d have to make do without them. He also let me know about Voldemort’s modification to the meme, and I swore openly at that. “If that’s going to happen in the next hour, it’s almost _guaranteed_ to swoop in and overtake the local hordes at some critical moment. This better not be some dramatic turn that’s supposed to make me reevaluate my commitment to nonlethal force, god damn it.”

I took off and they braced in their seats. I wasn’t actually much faster than I’d been before my _Awakening_ upgrade- Pathfinder simply didn’t have tables that scaled as high as I’d gotten. With a Strength score in the mid-hundreds I had the ability to lift something on the order of 70 million _tons_ \- I’d heard that the Great Pyramid weighed around 6 million, so eleven or so of those simultaneously. I _should_ have been able to exert enough lifting force to exceed a Saturn V rocket by an order of magnitude- but instead, I was merely flying at 200mph instead of 170mph. It was frustrating to say the least. I called back to my passengers. “Husband of mine, can you Apparate us to London? The wizards are already there and we can’t take the time to fly to Westminster from Scotland.”

He considered. “Well, I don’t recall any studies of people trying to apparate a dragon the size of a battleship, but that might actually work in our favor. My magic seems to think it’s possible.” It was still odd to me hearing him refer to an aspect of himself in the third person like that, but it was a minor quirk among the things he’d picked up while we’d been apart- most charming among them, to me, being a slight English accent. I stopped woolgathering and nodded approval to him to try- he took a firm grip on Hermione, and placed an outstretched hand on one wing, and _whoop_. It felt like all the breath had been smashed out of me at once, like my body had suddenly been forced through a narrow rubber tube, like I’d turned inside out and pulled apart and placed back together again, and then it was over as soon as it began and we exploded out the side of a house in the middle of a quiet suburb. Literally exploded- by the time I’d regained my senses and some altitude, the pieces of the poor structure had rained from me onto the neighborhood below. “Sean, what the hell?”

I couldn’t turn to look back at him but I could hear the embarrassment in his voice. “Sorry, sorry- I envisioned us appearing in the bedroom I started out in. Not really an appropriate place for a flying dragon to materialize.” But it was a good thing we had- I hadn’t even begun to get my bearings before tracers began to stitch up and towards me.

“Shit! Hang on!” I cried, and threw a _Prismatic Sphere_ around myself while ascending to put some distance between my body and the weapons batteries. They’d tracked his house down, of course, and placed an armed cordon around the damn thing in case he or I tried to use it. _Damn!_ I kicked myself for not thinking ahead even as I noticed a telltale white puff and streak of fire rising from the ground nearby. I didn’t bother to dodge- at subsonic speeds I was not going to avoid any air-to-ground missile they cared to fire at me, and I trusted in my natural armor and damage resistance to ignore anything short of WMD-level effects. My passengers were surrounded in the shields I’d used to neutralize _nuclear weapons_ , so they’d be fine. Sure enough, the missiles impacted with the force of a spitball and we sailed onwards and upwards, out of the trap. _A far cry from Piper’s arrow knocking me out of the sky, a month ago._ _But they know we’re here_. Another thought occurred to me. _I sure hope they didn’t station anyone_ inside _the house. So damn hard not to kill anyone, at this size._ We couldn’t go back and make sure- we _had_ to get to the Ministry. More difficult than I’d have thought, from up here. “Sean, can you point me to Westminster from here?”

He thought for a minute. “Well, I’d say generally South and East of here, but we don’t need to look _too_ hard,” he said, tapping my side to get my attention and then pointing where he wanted me to look. Sure enough- enormous black clouds were gathering over a river, what I assumed was the Thames, to our south. “That’s not Matt, the thunderbirds won’t be in place for a while yet,” my husband called. I agreed silently and rolled over to tack towards the disturbance, my passengers gripping tight- Hermione shouting with fear and excitement, Sean simply gritting his teeth and getting ready for the fight of our lives. _Whatever they’ve got there, conventional arms are only going to be the beginning._

We were halfway there in minutes- long before we arrived it was clear that the gathering storm was indeed magical in nature. It swirled about the buildings of downtown Westminster, dwarfing Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. “You know I’m not actually sure where the Ministry is-” I said, scanning the surface.

“I can see the auras,” said Sean, indicating a fairly nondescript looking area off of the central government district. “It’s going to be entirely underground- we want the door on the deepest level. You _could_ shrink down and take an elevator.” He said that with such deadpan humor. “But you’re absolutely going to do something flashy, aren’t you.” Oh, he knew me so well.

“We have to _get_ there first!” Cried Hermione, pointing further East. Fawkes squawked in alarm, still on her shoulder. Two jets were screaming in on our position- _damn, they’ve got air support?_ After the incident with the submarine I shouldn’t have been surprised, but still- I wasn’t sure what they thought air to air missiles were going to do when the surface to air varieties had failed so spectacularly.

“Ignore them- keep your shields up, stay in the bubble. It’ll be fine,” I said, while throwing a couple additional defensive spells on myself- A _Mirror Image_ to no-sell any direct fire, a _Displacement_ , to make me harder to hit, and a _Contingency_ to transform the first hostile missile to enter in range into butterflies. That last, I instructed my Council of Haleys on the other side of the ring to maintain- I could only have one Contingency at a time, but it would help. I also told them to do what they could about the jets- I didn’t have the spell range but a few targeted _Wishes_ would do the trick. Seconds later the streaking fighters were replaced by sparrows, their pilots harmlessly expelled and drifting downwards from high enough (I hoped) to activate their chutes. That left only the two missiles they’d managed to get off. The first puffed into harmless colored insects the second it entered our range.

The second nearly killed us all.

I’d considered that it might be nuclear-tipped, given how little I knew about conventional weapons. I thought I’d had some experience with nukes. But when the second missile detonated- well before it entered range of my protection- it was like hell had been transported to Earth. One moment there was a white object streaking towards us, and the next the sky around us became a fireball, hotter than the sun. It was _angry_. In that brief instant it roiled with _beings_ , claws and faces manifesting, reaching out, and falling away in milliseconds. Time stood still as I tried to get my wings up to shield my passengers from the initial flash. Slow, too slow. The _Prismatic Sphere_ would neutralize heat and force, but I feared that just the _light_ of it was going to tear them apart.

Time resumed. I was immune to the heat, though the flash dazed me- but I was still vulnerable to _claws,_ if given sufficient force, and the creatures riding the blast tore great rents in my hide as they passed, even as the pressure wave picked me up and slapped me out of the sky like a child throwing a toy. We hit the ground at many times the speed of sound and I left a long bloody furrow through the ground and buildings of the city as I spread myself out, trying to slow us down without reducing my passengers to a bloody paste or flinging them from my back. _This_ time, I had enough contingencies in place to ensure that no one killing blow would end my husband, Hermione, _or_ Telantes, but recovering their cloned selves would have taken time. I spread my arms and legs, taking further damage as I let the rubble of the city grind against me, slowing my momentum. I was still far from dead by the time we’d slowed, and my husband was still shouting, which I took as a good sign. We slid to a halt and heals began to flow from the other side of the gate, repairing damage done to me. The expanding fireball and blast wave washed over us, obliterating a substantial portion of the city and releasing a flood of ragged black ghosts _._ I couldn’t see much in the devastation, but judging by the numbers the whole city would have been swamped by them. Soon they’d find us again. “Blinded! Healing it!” Sean called, and I didn’t waste any further time. Between him and the bird, they’d be fine. Additional heals would be incoming from the simulacra, and I was already back to full strength after the work they’d done.

But the nature of the attack unsettled me. “That was a magical nuke, Sean. They’ve been preparing for us. It was packed with _dementors._ ” And there was no telling how many people it had just obliterated, detonated over one of the most densely-populated cities on earth. No doubt they’d all have been taken by the Concept so I _could_ take it as a blessing, but- that kind of megadeath could never be anything but an atrocity, to me. The rising column of flame and smoke was a backdrop to our confrontation that would be seen across all of England. 

“A demonstration of sincerity,” called a voice, and I whipped my head around to see a black bearded man with a wizard’s staff and cane walking out of a hole between dimensions nearby. “To illustrate to you the _cost_ of-”

I didn’t waste time _chatting_ with the motherfucker, who was undoubtedly going to turn out to be the Merlin that Telantes had warned me about. _Time Stop_ took me out of the flow that he could react to. I had my simulacra throw as many _Merciful Delayed Blast Fireballs_ as they could- a hundred beads of force surrounding him with non lethal bombs, timed to detonate the instant that time resumed. “Already reconsidering my no-kill stance and we’ve been in combat less than two minutes,” I muttered, positioning myself immediately behind and above him. This probably wouldn’t kill him, regardless. Probably.

From his perspective, he emerged from a portal and barely completed his first sentence when the Statue of Liberty sized dragon _popped_ behind him and a wave of detonations washed over him as her feet came down with _millions_ of pounds of crushing force. I think it was more extreme than he’d expected- he didn’t die outright, but when I lifted my front claws from the hole they had punched clear through into the tunnels beneath the city, he was no longer present. “Shit,” I said out loud. “It’s not just Gretchen here.” We had their portal tech back in second Ingenium- so whoever was here, they must have come in by train. 

Sean was still alive on my back, holding Hermione tightly as she clutched her aching head and tried to recover her wits. “The Coordinator or whatever it’s called behind all this knows that this is the one battleground it needs to win, today. Everyone you told me about is probably here.” He thought for a second and I knew what he was about to say. I was already shaking my head when he said “We should split up.”

“Not even an hour ago by my timeline, you were telling me that was the worst possible idea. Now I feel pretty inclined to _agree_ , Sean. You two- three, sorry Telantes- wouldn’t last a _second_ out here. We’re in a race for that doorway. Once we get close enough they’ll have to moderate the weapons they use for fear of damaging it.”

He shook his head and pointed towards the gathering storm over Westminster. “ _Getting close_ is going to be a bigger challenge than you suggest. Look.” I lifted my head above the nearby buildings and saw what he was indicating. The stormclouds had begun to part. They were clearly unnatural, what was going on with them? Something occurred to me- _Merlin_. Of course. This was London, the seat of power for the nation he was the near-mythological _founder_ of, and Harry Potter, the story in which he had been given demigod-hood over an entire _second_ society. The Last Son of Atlantis was at the height of his capabilities here. But what he was doing with them-

He might have come in on the train, but he was going to bring everyone _else_ first-class. He’d opened a series of doors miles wide in the air above the city. Coming through was my worst nightmare made manifest. _Two_ brass cities of the Efreet, fresh off the battles in my home dimension, surrounded by flying armies of blue-eyed genies, swarming in numbers so thick they looked like locusts. Separately, the entirety of Delmutt’s advanced society- captured by the Concept and turned against me with all of their hypertech- flooding down in their own wave of carriers, flyers, and drones. And finally- what _was_ that? It seemed to lurk on the far side of the portals, too _big_ to come through- it was enormous, so big that I could see portions of it laying behind _every_ portal, but it was smooth and mechanical and dressed in layer after layer of force fields. “It’s Aslan’s army all over again, but a million times worse, and this time half of them are our friends.” I was having a crisis of confidence. “Sean, I don’t think I can fight them all if I don’t turn the rest of my simulacra loose. But if I _do-”_

He finished my thought. “There won’t be a city left to fight over. It’s going to kill a lot of people, if you fight all of that. It’s a problem, dear. What if we just- _didn’t_? What if we, I don’t know, go invisible and teleport straight to the door, smash it, and be done with this?”

It was an option. As the armies formed up, I took time to consider it, but ultimately found it wanting. “No. We can’t leave all of this in the hands of the Concept. If I go big enough I can probably neutralize most of them without injury. Those I can’t- the Infomorphs will be backed up, the Efreet we can probably bring back, if Matt’s resurrections are an indicator. But the people of this city- I can’t simply write them off.” Despair gripped me. “It’s just too _big_ to keep everyone safe. But I can’t fight this battle without thinking about tomorrow.”

Sean’s eyes lit up- I’d triggered something for him. “Yes you can. _Yes you can._ Haley, do you trust me?”

I nodded. “With all my heart.”

He gave me a quick hug from his position on my back. “Teleport Hermione and I-” an angry squeak sounded- “And Telantes and Fawkes, sorry, teleport all four of us as close to the Ministry as you can. Then, go nuts. Show them exactly how far beyond _strength_ you’ve gone. No mercy. Don’t worry about casualties. Just don’t wreck the Ministry building or the floors beneath it. Can you do that?”

I could, but I wasn’t just going to let myself go _killing_ people. I said as much, but he smiled and patted me. “They’ll be fine. Long run, they’ll be fine. Trust me. I wouldn’t set you up to fail in this.” That was true. Alright.

I squared my shoulders and faced the looming threat. “Sean, I’d better see you again on the other side of this. If you die on me a second time I _will_ come and find you, do you understand?” He kissed the back of my neck and grinned silently. I wished up a pair of short-wave radios for emergency communication and handed him one. Then I sighed, shook my head, and teleported them away. I’d pull as much of the heat off them as I could. And I’d make a statement, here and now. To the Concept, or the Coordinator, or whatever it wanted to call itself, I had a message. “You haven’t been very interested in talking so far. So maybe I’ll just tell you _my_ side. No matter how hard you fight me- this world _is_ going to save itself. You and I, we’re just a side show today.” I reached down and grabbed a light truck off the road I had crashed into. “But you’d better hope you win. You and I both work through other people, but the _reasons_ we do it- I don’t even know what you want, ultimately, but I know that it’s totally incompatible with what _I_ want, a world where everybody’s safe and secure and in control of their own lives. If I walk out of here I’m _coming for you_ and you’re going to learn why half the people you mind controlled today _already_ thought I was their god.”

Right. No mercy, he said. I _really_ hoped he understood what he was asking. I hefted the truck, took careful aim, and _heaved_. I couldn’t apply all seventy million pounds of lifting force, of course- but I applied a _few_. The truck departed my hand in pieces, shrapnel traveling at roughly mach thirty, crossing the distance between myself and the armies of the Infomorphs and Efreet in the blink of an eye, tearing a cone of red ruin through one formation. This wasn’t a lone hero versus an army- this was an army hopelessly outmatched by _godzilla_ , and she’d brought _friends_. “Come on then. Let’s get started.”

\----

Sean, Hermione and Telantes

\----

We found ourselves on a side street off the main thoroughfares of downtown London, just around the corner from the Ministry. For a while, Hermione and I didn’t move at all- I maintained a _Disillusion_ charm on myself, and she stayed under the cloak of invisibility. The few humans we saw around us- all taken by the Concept, at this point, but apparently not directly involved in the battle- were clearly on high alert for anyone coming our way. But that wasn’t what stopped us.

We were transfixed by the sights in the sky- it was the battle of Ragnarok incarnate. Haley had finally turned her simulacra loose, and they in turn had abused their summoning abilities. An army of angels, demons, and dragons the size of entire city blocks met in the air against millions of drones, genies, and the indescribable lava-based super-weapons of the floating fortresses. Explosions and streaks of fire lit the evening sky and turned encroaching shadows into midday light. Pieces of debris plummeted down and obliterated whole buildings in their passage. We couldn’t tell from where we were standing, but it sure sounded like somewhere far away in that fracas, additional hell-nukes had been detonated and quickly obscured by prismatic counters. The _sound_ of it was so brutal that the glass at street-level was near totally shattered in the first few exchanges, and all of us on the ground needed magical hearing protection to avoid being deafened.

“It’s like someone took a whole war and compressed it down to just a few minutes!” Shouted Hermione, hunched beneath her cloak next to me. She’d finally got Fawkes to join her under there, though he’d squawked enough about it. Being the owner of one of the other Deathly Hallows in the form of the elder wand, I apparently had less trouble detecting her than others might have. That was good- I didn’t want to lose track of her if things got any _more_ chaotic.

I waved her forward towards the Ministry. “Time’s wasting. They’re probably well on their way to the ninth sub-basement by now. Haley will do what she does- we’ve got to do our part now.” Easier said than done. We exited the alley and were immediately confronted by our first major obstacle. Instead of Concept-possessed mages, the street before us was crowded by _dementors_. Released by the bombs to roam the city, they weren’t searching for us after all, or behaving randomly. They _flocked_ , surrounding the Ministry in a great turning river of torn black cloaks and clutching, skeletal fingers. “Oh, I _really_ don’t like where this is going.” Those on the edges noticed _something_ about us, even beneath my invisibility, and dozens began to peel away, approaching. I could feel the chill of their presence encroaching on the tips of my fingers and toes, the beginnings of entropy creeping into my soul. I wasn’t convinced, as some of the researchers I’d read had been, that these things were death _incarnate_ , but they were certainly anathema to living beings.

Hermione turned to me desperately. “Your patronus! You’ve got to use it!” She followed up by trying to cast her own, managing a weak light that was _extremely_ impressive for a first year student but still nothing in the face of so many of the weightless, ragged monsters. I whipped out the Elder Wand and did not bother to speak the incantation. My magic leapt through it, emerging into the real world brighter and more solid than ever before- the moonlight reflection of the dragons doing battle above us. She was shining so bright as she came roaring out that the dementors nearest to her were blown to pieces, like cobwebs before a storm wind. She dove into the rest, tearing apart those too foolish to get out of our way. I could hear shouts as the zombified humans nearby realized that something was going on.

“Alright, stick close and I’ll get you across this river,” I told my young student and her flaming bird sidekick. “Once we’re inside there’s a very real chance we’re going to be split up. You need to do everything you can to get into that bottom level and stop Gretchen from walking through the door. You understand me? Don’t wait for me. If it looks like I’m going to die, just keep moving. It won’t be the first time and I’ll come back from it, some day. This is about getting you where you need to go.” She looked conflicted at that but nodded grimly, and we marched onwards and inwards, the tide of silent death parting around my silver-white dragon as we began to cross the street to the ministry. Even the mind-controlled humans balked at crossing that expanse- we would have some seconds inside before they made it to us.

Halfway through there was an interruption- a terrifyingly hot and bright explosion in the sky. I couldn’t help but glance up. Apparently some of the forces in the air had seen the disturbance we were making in the dementor flow, and come down to take a pass at us. They’d been intercepted by one of the Haleys. The heat we’d felt was her breath- she opened her mouth and a cone in front of her _ceased to be_ , every atom inside of it converted to forms of strange matter by the absolute heat that she emitted. Nothing of the original attackers remained, and I made a mental note to get us treated for radiation poisoning before the day was out, but that wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks. “Oh no.”

Away and above our more local conflicts there was a _squad_ of Haleys winging for one of the great storming portal-gashes in the sky, in a V formation. They were headed for that god-machine on the other side, the one too big to come through in one piece. Then the thing in the other world opened fire- invisibly, or perhaps simply so fast that I couldn’t perceive it- and the squad disintegrated. Most melted into snow as they died but one, that could _only_ be the real Haley, fell from the sky gouting blood and fire, crashing to the streets a mile away from us but still so heavy that we felt the impact through our feet. “No!” I shouted, and took one step in that direction before I realized my job here overrode all other concerns.

“We’ve got to help her!” shouted Telantes, and leapt from my pocket with the remainder of the vial of Swooping Evil venom that I’d procured from Snape clutched in his furry paws. I grabbed for him but he slipped my grasp, and vanished underneath the roiling, floating sea of dementors. I could only pray he was too small and alien to grab their attention- there would be no pursuing him now.

“Should we go after him?” Asked Hermione, concern clear in her voice. She wanted to help as much as I did, I knew.

  
Every instinct said _yes_. But I restrained myself. “No. She’ll be fine. If she’s right about all of this, he’ll get to her when she needs him. We need to stay focused here.” _And if she dies, there’s nothing in the universe that will keep me from her._ We carried on, and took our first step across the threshold of the Ministry. Just in time, too- behind us on the other side of the dementors, I could see the first hints in the eyes of the Concept-taken humans of an oncoming tide of green.


	49. Chapter 49

\----

Haley, In The Thick Of It

\----

Summoning copies of myself was exceptionally risky, even now. Mind control by the Concept was still a real threat. We’d solved the problem, I hoped, with a _Magic Jar_ spell- each body out here was actually being piloted by a separate copy of me within the dimension, with its mind stored in a special gem and the other mind’s original body moved far enough away to not be immediately possessable if things went poorly. If one of my clones got meme’d, they were under orders to immediately end the spell, hot-swapping them back into their gem and placing the other, uncorrupted version back in control of its’ body. Then a support team could eliminate the memes using _Repress Memory_ , leaving the gem-mind ready to take over another body. It was rough, but it was working.

As I flung my first shot in response and took off into the air, the skies over London _erupted_. A hundred thousand dragons each the size of a mid sized navy warship flew through the air from individual gates. With enough of me on the battlefield to blot out the skies, some might have called that good enough. But we were not in the business of _good enough_. As the first nuke of the battle had detonated, flinging me to the ground, and the call to action spread around my second dimension, my simulacra began a summoning chain. It was the same trick I had used during my brief play for the ring. _Communal Mount_ was turned via _Heighten Spell_ and _Alter Summoned Monster_ into a factory for near-infinite Angelic reinforcements. A single Simulacra-Haley could produce six high-tier monsters every forty-two seconds, repeating until they were out of relevant spell slots, then send their minions through to assist.

By the time the dragons swept the skies, each was orbited and attended by dozens of angels, devils and elementals each. The huge formations darkened the air and plowed into the massed armies of the genies and infomorphs. Their rules of engagement were simple- I had only one goal, total air superiority and removal of these threats from the wider multiverse. If they decided the situation warranted full lethality- well, we would restore all of those lost from backup or resurrection as needed. The damage to Concept-captured humans on the ground… I tried not to think about. Sean said he had a solution, and I had to trust him.

It unsettled me anyway. None of this should have been necessary. The gate wasn’t even that large of a prize- it would be a convenient shortcut for the enemy to be able to step into any story it wanted, but as Asriel’s portal had demonstrated, there were other ways of achieving that goal- why the total commitment here? It had to be due to Sean and I’s involvement.

I didn’t take any particular role in coordinating the assault- we wanted a distributed command and control structure, one that would be resilient against any memetic attack. My personal retinue was a half dozen of my clones at full size, and another half dozen in human form riding shotgun on my back. The first formation I met was Efreet. They were a hundred strong, armed and armored in the panoply of war that the Brass Cities produced- brass armor and flaming swords and glorious black banners listing their heritage and victories. Their eyes glowed blue, and they didn’t speak. But I recognized who had put herself in the front of the charge. Jada and I met again, for the third time.

_She_ wasn’t infected, I noted, and called her on it. “Sold your own people out as quickly as you could, huh?”

She snarled as she pulled back her flaming greatsword. “The Concept betrayed us, tricked us into a foolish war and then took both sides while we were distracted! But it promised me _your_ hide for a coat, if I would stay loyal long enough to lead the rest of my people. I would rather be empress of the ashes than your slave.”

I shook my head sadly as we winged to a halt in front of her. “You were _never_ my slave, Jada. We had a contract, and I was prepared to go outside it for you. I _wanted_ to help you, I was just scared of- well, something exactly like this. Once humanity could defend itself I think I would have turned you loose.”

She didn’t balk, exactly, but some of the fire left her. “You _think_. That remorse in your voice- do you truly mean that?”

I tried to smile at her. “You built me a dimension. Your people, more than anyone else, kept the world safe and fed in the first days. I told you I wasn’t ungrateful. But you anticipated a knife in the back and planted one of your own. I haven’t got time for mercy today, Jada. But if I see you on the other side of this… we’ll talk, okay?” She considered for a moment, and nodded. We both knew there was no escaping the clash, or changing what the outcome would be. But she raised her weapon in a warrior’s salute and made the charge anyway.

The rest of her entourage raised their weapons and blasted a hundred waves of cold at us- it should have been a frightening move, one of the few energy types that we were not completely immune to. But we’d grown beyond such things. I wasn’t the Haley who’d dueled her in a field for the use of her people, or even the Haley who’d heard her threats and insinuations at court less than a week ago. Our formation plowed through their blasts without a scratch, and every one of us opened our mouths in response. They would be immune to fire, which was no doubt the Concept’s intention in setting them in our path- a wonderful tar pit that we’d have to club our way through while that giant machine behind the portal did… _whatever_ they intended it to do. But we didn’t breath fire- we tapped our _other_ breath ability, the weakening gas. Even now it was weak in comparison to the flames we could produce. But only _relatively_ weak. One blast from any of us could have knocked out the whole formation. And there were a _dozen_ of us, and our stats made that ability damage utterly, _utterly_ irresistible. Every one of the hundred-plus efreet fell from the sky, Strength sapped away to nothing, and we flew on. I couldn’t spare a last glance for Jada. “Up! Up! Get to the portal!”

We arced upwards, spamming wand-based _Dimension Doors_ to increase our travel speed, leaping forward by a quarter of a mile per cast. I still didn’t know what that _thing_ on the other side of the portal-storms was, but I was willing to bet that it would be the linchpin of their assault, the trump card meant to counter my overwhelming firepower. So far it hadn’t done much, and reports were already sweeping in from the battle- the efreet were being neutralized with incredible speed, largely without casualties, which was heartening news. The infomorph drones were putting up a stiffer resistance- their gravity rifles were no longer any particular threat to us, but they weren’t susceptible to most knockout attacks- most of my clones had ignored my rules of engagement allowing lethal force and were using _Mass Hold Monster_ to paralyze them for extended periods of time. I was proud of them, for refusing to compromise. The spell wouldn’t last terribly long, even at our extremely heightened caster levels- but we only needed it to last long enough for the arch to be ours.

We drew closer to the miles-wide eye of the nearest storm. Close enough for me to see through the hundreds of overlapping fields around the machine, to read the writing emblazoned on the side of it- in English, no less. “Plate-class GSV… oh no. _Break formation!”_ We scattered, even the simulacra on my back leaping off to transform and take flight, but it was too late. Truth be told, it had probably been too late the moment the portals had opened and the Culture ship had been able to extend sensorium on this side of the dimensional gap. It had just been waiting for me to distinguish myself from my copies before it engaged. And I’d just done so, flying right at it.

There was no shot or energy blast- it was a hyperspatial entity, it had no need for such things. Instead across the battlefield my clones simply… _died_. In a wave reaching outwards from the ship, they went limp and vanished into snow and dust. I shouted in horror as creatures capable of taking a nuclear weapon to the face and carrying on just _evaporated_ in the face of that god-machine. The summoned monsters went with them- some throwing up their hands or diving for the ground at the last second, but it did no good. The ship took them all, without moving an inch.

I’d worked with some of my clones for subjective _months_. They were still me, but- they were friends, colleagues as well. They had no souls as far as Pathfinder was concerned- there’d be no replacing them, no resurrection. I couldn’t quite fathom the level of the loss I was experiencing, or the absolute nature of it. I didn’t even know the specifics of how they’d died. The ship might have been displacing a small bomb into their brains, it might have been reaching into their minds via hyperspace and just _turning them off_. A GSV was capable of that, I knew. I ducked into another _Dimension Door,_ trying to evade, but-

“Where is it you think you’re going, when you jump through one of those?” came a voice from all around me. “I don’t grant you passage through my space.” The rejection was not just verbal- it was _absolute_ , and the energy of that strange in-between space rose up to consume me. I was flung backwards from the door, nearly torn in half by its’ collapse. It was still speaking in my brain. “Be a dear and don’t get up, and I’ll leave your mind intact. There’s a man who’d like to speak to you.” In that moment, I don’t think I could have if I wanted to. I plummeted to the ground in blood and flame, crashing into a street in London for a second time in the last hour. The support team in the other dimension was on it, healing me as I fell- but I ordered them not to come through. We’d expected this- nothing so extreme, but _something_ to trump us. Instead of another wave of clones, other plans were set in motion. And in the meantime- Sean could carry on, while the Concept’s attention was on me. As it so very clearly was.

A whole cadre was waiting for me at my crash site. Like they _knew_ I was going to fall here precisely… or a certain ship had transported them here via displacer the second I landed. I blinked blearily, and images of my last day at court in the stadium flashed through my head for some reason. A horde of blue-eyed zombies surrounded me, human and infomorph and efreet, stretching as far back as the eye could see. But closer still the crowd was… oddly familiar, and none of their eyes were showing the telltale blue of memetic infection- except for two. Lord Asriel stood, slack jawed and silent, mind fully taken by the Concept, alongside a young woman with the same affliction who I could only assume was Telantes’ other half, Anna. Around him stood a range of figures I had met before and some I hadn’t- Merlin, and was that Greg the Hobbit? And the Dog! Oh, I’d been worried about him. But also… _Mom?_ She was standing at the side of what looked an awful lot like a copy of _me,_ alongside Skylar. It was everyone I’d last seen at the stadium, and then some. Striding to the front was the only figure of the group I hadn’t at least seen once, but I could guess his name easily enough.

“Sherlock Holmes, I presume,” I said wryly, shifting to human form in the middle of the crater I’d left in the middle of the street (and several buildings), the better to actually see all of these people. “You’ve got quite the collection there.” I tried to quell the rage inside me, the howling loss of my army of alternate selves, the _anger_ I felt at this man. I could kill him in an instant. He had to know that.

He smiled at me and it was surprisingly earnest. “I wanted you to know you were among friends.”

I gave him my biggest, fakest smile. “Go to hell. I assume you arranged all of this?”

He nodded. “Yes. Terribly sorry. You continually placed yourself in the path of the Concept, and I needed to remove you in one stroke. The veiled arch served as convenient bait and a worthy goal, but _you_ were always my target.” He held up a hand to forestall any response. “Please, I don’t mean to _kill_ you. But I needed you to understand that this would be a conversation among equals. You have your army and I have mine- which was also, at one point, your army.” He smirked at his own pun. He _really_ wanted me to kill him. Or he was just that oblivious. “Regardless. Now that force has been ruled out, with admirably few casualties I might add, well done, we can sit down and talk.”

“You don’t usually begin a friendly exchange with a _missile,”_ I growled. “I know Merlin and Asriel’s loyalties, and I think I can _assume_ yours. If the Coordinator had anything it wanted to say peacefully, it could have come to me at the stadium. It could have come to me at Hogwarts. Instead, it’s attacked us, _all of us,_ at every turn. But force hasn’t worked, has it? Your master can’t seem to _make_ me do what it wants and I think, just maybe, it’s scared of what I represent. Why it doesn’t just kill me? It keeps missing the mark, on that.” I looked up at the big ship in the sky, still negotiating through the widening portals. “It’d be a lot easier than talking, right now.”

Holmes kept that easy smile as he walked up to me. “I’d say, judging by its’ actions so far, that it _doesn’t_ want to kill you. Rather, it wants to _recruit_ you. Though perhaps that is my own bias speaking. Though you are incorrect when you assume my loyalties. _They,_ ” and he indicated Asriel and Merlin, who jerked with alarm, “have been sabotaging the Concept from the very start. They resent the loss of freedom and autonomy.”

Merlin shook a fist at him. “I’ve sabotaged _nothing_ , you bastard! You stand before her because _I_ placed you there!”

I looked at him levelly. “You understand that I’ll probably kill you first, if it comes to a fight.”

The old wizard scoffed at me. “Like to see you try, child. But… the wheel is always turning. Might be a day when you’re up and I’m down. Understand, there’s no animosity here- I do what I must to preserve the realm and myself.” _Including handing it over wholesale to monsters?_

Sherlock dismissed the man with a wave of his hand. “ _I_ , on the other hand, am working with it willingly. And I’d like to extend the offer to you, to do the same. One copy of you has already agreed.” I eyed the clone of myself and she nodded. Really needed to hear the story there. He continued- “Perhaps that will make more sense if I explain.” He opened his mouth, paused, and then a gleam entered his eye. “But, to be honest- I’ve heard so much about you. I’d like to see what you can deduce.”

I looked at the others standing behind him. Mom looked scared and bewildered, but she was continually glancing at the _other_ me for reassurance. Skylar looked defiant. Greg looked timid, and he was continually fingering something in his pocket that was undoubtedly the Ring I really didn’t want to think about right now, but he didn’t seem like he was about to bolt. Merlin looked barely restrained- he seemed to be on the verge of a fight or flight response. The other Haley was the real mystery to me. She regarded me calmly. Not mind controlled, apparently here of her own free will- despite everything we’d seen the Concept do. She’d have split off from me a few weeks ago, with the first Contact teams- unlikely that she’d known about the side projects then, as I’d still been under a _Geas_ not to think about them. She returned my gaze levelly. The only person on his side who wasn’t taking cues from Holmes was the Dog, and _it_ appeared to be having trouble moving at all.

He seemed to be leaving me room to speak. I called out to mom. “Are you okay?” She nodded but still held tight to the other Haley. That hurt a bit, to be honest, but I wouldn’t hold it against her.

I frowned in thought at Holmes, shoving my rage down beneath the surface for now. “You have a story. Whatever it’s told you must be pretty compelling. At least one copy of _me_ believes it. You brought everybody I care about, that you could _find_ , here with you, to convince me to hear you out peacefully. Whatever the Coordinator wants requires… pretty much multiversal coverage through the Concept, or is achievable much quicker that way, and _you_ think it would much rather have me on its side than opposed. Though I disagree with that, given past… encounters. It’s possible that it _can’t_ kill me- only eliminate my present body. I wonder, would dying make me _less_ dangerous to it, or _more_?” No answer. I continued. “But it _lies_ , Sherlock. You can’t trust anything it says.”

He nodded. “Perhaps. And yet, the methods it has displayed so far would seem to be in keeping with what it has told me. Shall we continue to dance around that point? Or would you like to hear what I know, before you condemn your friends and family for standing with me?” I sighed and rolled my hand in a ‘Get on with it’ gesture. He clapped his hands. “Splendid! So glad you’re willing to listen.” He produced a camp stool from somewhere and sat down on the edge of my crater. “Well over a month ago I found myself in a strange world, beset by strange problems. Recognizing nobody, I began evaluating the situation and soon realized I’d been transported, summoned. And that I was not the only one. _Stories_ were cropping up, and-”

I really didn’t need the recap, but he seemed content to ramble and I was inclined to let him- as long as he talked, my plans already in motion could continue. And _I_ could survey the crowd for a way out of this. The Wiltshire Dog was the one that interested me. Of all of them, he seemed entirely paralyzed. Except for the eyes. _They_ were blinking rather rapidly, in what I eventually came to realize was morse code. “H - E - L - P. Z - E - N - O.” Repeating endlessly. I was taken aback, for a moment. _Delmutt’s lost lover? No. The Greek philosopher?_ I had no idea what the Dog could be trying to indicate. Behind him, I saw the briefest flash of something scurrying up Anna’s leg- I had a feeling I knew who _that_ was. I asked, and the narrative continued to provide. The zombies surrounding us continued to stare, unblinking, unmoving. I’d long since learned to ignore them.

Holmes was still carrying on and finally getting to the interesting bits. “-I finally made contact with the creature behind the Concept. It spoke to me through the original vector of the memetic infection, one Arthur Anderson. I asked it why it was causing such chaos with such nonlethal methods- if _conquest_ was its intent, surely it wouldn’t work so hard to preserve the lives of individuals! Yet a memetic takeover of all of England and, eventually, the world was sure to cause damage on a scale undreamt of. What Arthur said to me changed the course of my reaction, as, I’m confident, it will change yours.” He leaned back in his stool and took on a slouched and surly posture- channeling the manner and the voice of the man he’d met a month ago in a nearly uncanny fashion. “He said-” a look of confusion crossed his face. “He said…” he cocked his head to the side. “But maybe it would be better if you heard it from yourself? The Haley that I met some time ago, yes?”

She stepped forward, but despite the chaos and confusion of the last hour, something was tickling the back of my mind. A sick feeling. _He keeps dodging his explanation._ “No. No, tell me what it said, Sherlock. _Exactly_ what the Coordinator said to you. The words it used, that converted you to its’ cause.”

Holmes looked stricken. “I- to be honest, I suddenly can’t recall.” His compatriots looked concerned. A murmur ran through the wider crowd. No, wait- those were zombies, they had no emotional response. It was a sound, barely perceptible, but it sent a shiver of _green_ running through them. Then another one. Those of us uninfected didn’t seem susceptible to it, but the Concept zombies were converting- and soon they’d go savage. _This is the shift Sean warned me about. Voldemort’s made his play, and his timing couldn’t be worse. Things are about to go to hell._

_Damn it all_. I marched up the rim of the crater towards him, ship above and threats of instant death be damned. I’d have to guess at this, and hope it played out. “You never _could_ recall. You’ve been operating this last month on _backstory._ That’s what it does. It worms its way into the unexamined moments in our narratives. There was no argument a monster like that could have made that would get _you_ on board, so it didn’t bother to make one. It just decided that you _were_ on board, had always _been_ on board, after it had your narrator. Then it used you to weaken me. You’ve been _played,_ detective. You never brought them here to _convert_ me. You brought them here to _get all its enemies in one place_.”

Merlin growled at him. “You thought you’d been working with this thing longer than _I_ have? I was there the day it took you! You fought against it right up to the last moment.”

The zombies were turning on each other- the others had begun to notice as violence broke out in the distance, still buffered from us. Sherlock looked around wildly, then collapsed back on the camp stool. “I _remember_ being convinced but I don’t remember _how._ But I- I also remember _resisting_. I…” he looked up at me with horror in his eyes. “I may have made a terrible mistake. Everything I set up was to bring you to this moment- to get all of us here. To _reason_ with you, I thought. Then- then what does it want? If not that, then what? Truly?” My mind was racing, searching for the same answer. But it wasn’t the monster that answered us.

“An end to heroes,” said the clone of me, walking past Holmes. It _sounded_ like me, but not. Pushed beyond the edge of grief and stress, into some mental landscape I’d tread close to, but never walked.  “Remember that, Haley? Remember what we wanted? I don’t know how _your_ life has gone, but _I’ve_ been shepherding zombies and watching the world end for the last two weeks. What would you give, to bring it all to a close? To not have to play the hero anymore? Here’s your opportunity. Work with it, and you don’t have to fight anymore.”

So that was her play. I swept my hand in dismissal. “I can believe I might give up, some day. I’ve come close enough in the past. But the fact that you’d participate in endangering _all_ of our friends and family for this? I can’t believe you share any part of me.”

She sneered. “Like you’ve done any better? _Ever person here_ has come close to death since getting wrapped up in our story! The Concept could have killed them _all_ if it wanted, while you were off running around once again, forgetting the _core_ of your ‘Principles.’ Save the people closest to you, remember? Well they’re around you _now_ because of the mercy of the monster you’re fighting. But you don’t have the slightest intention of backing down, do you.”

Her words rocked me back. She wasn’t… _right,_ exactly. I wasn’t responsible for every terrible thing that happened in my absence. But she _was_ right that I hadn’t been thinking of the people here. Had she, truly? “A bargaining chip is not the same thing as ‘Mercy,’ other me. You know that, deep inside. It will kill these people in a heartbeat if it furthers its goals. What it _wants_ is to spread until it owns everything, and then- well, it’s still a mystery. But you can help me keep them safe, _and_ stop it, here and now.”

She looked downcast at my words. “I can’t help you. It’s too big- it’s _all_ too big. We were never going to be able to keep them safe.” She really had given in to despair. _Was this the path I was on?_

I tried to reassure her. “You’re not in possession of all the facts, sister. When we split off, I still wasn’t able to remember the _other_ part of what we were up to. I reached the same breaking point you did. But then I remembered. I had _help_ remembering, from Skylar and Delmutt. It was never really about us playing the hero. We were just the cover while the rest of me got the world ready for-” I gestured at the increasing madness of the zombie horde that surrounded us on the street, as far as the eye could see. They still hadn’t noticed us, intent for the time being on consuming their blue-eyed compatriots. “For _that._ ”

She laughed. “As if that makes it all better! Up until my breakdown and your little epiphany, you and I were doing _exactly_ the same thing. A half-assed job as we tried and failed to make up our minds! All we had to do was _take power_. The Concept gets that- the only way it can win is by imposing its will. And maybe it’s not a perfect end for you and I, but it’s an _end_. An end to this madness. But you haven’t abandoned your fantasy that the whole thing is going to sort itself out, somehow. That if you just wait long enough, people will figure out how to fix it! _How’s that working out for you_?”

I roared in defiance. To hear my own doubts echoed back at me, as my friends and family were desperately trying to avoid the encroaching tide of monsters around us- “ _Great,_ until the Concept came along and sabotaged us! You are _directly responsible_ for fucking this up!”

She roared back, running at me. This was going to end in blows- the kind of blows that could level buildings. “ _I_ fucked it up? _You_ made all of this necessary when you went off script! How many holes have you punched through dimensions? The Coordinator wants to put things back in order. If you’d stopped escalating, _it_ could stop! No more _clones_ , no more _supermen,_ no more _dragons_. No more _us_. Just a few deaths, a few narrators, and then a bunch of nice safe little worlds where everything works like it should. You could go back to Sean. _I_ could go back. Isn’t that what we want?”

_No_ , that wasn’t what I wanted. Not entirely. Was it? Wasn’t it? I stumbled, in my sprint towards her. Was all of this- in reaction to me? Was I the one destabilizing the world now, by my presence? Could I just… _go home_ , or join forces with this monster, and end all of this trouble at once? Was it worth the cost?

“Beggin’ yer pardon ma’ams, but that’s a load of bull if I ever heard one” said a small voice from between the two of us. Without even noticing, Greg had stepped there- he’d placed himself in the path of _two_ charging Haleys this time. “Holmes there wanted me to come and spot your weak points, just like in the original Hobbit, just in case. Ceptin’ I don’t think your weak point is a missing scale. I think it’s that _none_ of yeh are really certain in yerselves. And that ain’t a weakness we can tolerate right now.”

Both of us came up short, with the little man in between us. Even in her desperation, she was still a copy of me- unwilling to murder an innocent for convenience’s sake. I considered the other me, inches from my face. We stood there and the tension built, for a long minute as the noise of the rioting horde grew louder. Then- miracle of miracles- we both blinked. Looked away in shame. “He’s right,” she muttered. “He’s right. Bigger problems now.”

“He’s more than right,” I said. “He’s here because the narrative _put_ him here.” It was beginning to dawn on me. “How many times have things _almost_ fallen apart, only to be pulled out at the last moment? Rising tension, and rising action, and then a payoff at the top?” She looked at me in confusion and I tried to explain. “The Coordinator wants us back in our walled gardens, no narratives- it wants to _end_ the one force that you and I are relying on, again and again, to save us all from disaster. Just a long slow slide into oblivion instead, as everything goes to shit in perfectly _normal_ and _ordinary_ ways.” It felt like I was getting through to her. I pressed on urgently, aware of how little time we had. “I think that, two weeks ago, I’d have questioned my actions the way you’re doing. I was looking for ways out. I might even have felt like the Concept was a better way- a tool to _force_ everyone back in their boxes before they got hurt. But I’ve had my shot at power, since then. I gave it back.” I gestured at the Ring in Greg’s pocket and he nodded. “And I’ve learned- people _can_ adapt to this new world, if we give them time. Sean, Roy, Matt- we didn’t need to force them. Just provide them with opportunities. And we don’t need to compromise with monsters. _Never_ that.” She looked ashamed, but I didn’t have time for drawn out recriminations. “We can win this, Haley. On _our_ terms. It may not be the end to our work, but it will be-”

I didn’t even have time to finish my sentence. The green tide of monsters was boiling over and swarming our little circle. The other Haley shifted to fully draconic, and surged back towards Skylar and our mother. Merlin threw up a line of _something_ to ward them off, apparently deciding they were the greater threat for now, and everything that crossed it turned to ash and powder. Greg slipped on the Ring, disappearing. But I saw zombies going down, cut off at the knees as he slashed at them. Asriel and the Dog were still neutralized- the Dog paralyzed, Asriel’s mind fully engaged by the Concept still. I began to batter my way toward them in human form, dragging Sherlock with me, simply grabbing zombies and pitching them out of my way. They were no threat to _me,_ but I needed to keep my friends safe. I summoned a _Wall of Iron_ between myself and my destination, knocking it over to crush a tight path to run down. But it couldn’t be that simple.

“ _IT WILL BE AN END,”_ said what I assumed was the ship’s avatar, appearing in front of us. A blank-white humanoid figure, faceless, hovering slightly off the ground. It wasn’t the voice of the ship that I’d heard earlier, in hyperspace. This was the Coordinator’s voice in full, the same one I’d heard on the phone and in that strange void between worlds- but magnified, raw. Angry? Holmes jumped at my side with a start, but the avatar’s hand flashed out and his head hit the ground, separated from his shoulders. Distantly my mother screamed, drawing the attention of the horde near her, on the ground _and_ in the air, and other-me grabbed her up, ready to defend her with breath and claw. The avatar didn’t miss a beat. “AN END TO YOU AND YOUR INTERFERENCE.”

I didn’t attack it. It would have been pointless. It could kill me in a heartbeat as long as it held the ship and the narrative momentum. But I _had_ to get past it to the last people I might be able to save. The Dog was losing great pieces of hide as the horde bit and clawed at it. Asriel and Anna were running towards us, but the Avatar stood between us still. I shouted at it in frustration. “Then kill me! Just- fucking _kill me,_ already. Or I promise you’ll regret it.” Holmes’ headless body collapsed, pumping life’s blood onto the iron beneath us. Discarded by the monster the second his purpose was spent.

The avatar smiled- a truly inhuman expression. “SOON. WHEN THIS WORLD IS BEHIND A NEW BARRIER. WHEN YOU WON’T SLIP THE NOOSE.”

Barrier? “You mean like our world was behind a barrier?” It _had_ claimed responsibility for that. But why would that allow it to kill me any more effectively- a chill ran down my spine. “The dead. I couldn’t bring back the dead or the disappeared, in that world. _You did something._ ” Merlin was throwing out great whirlwinds to disrupt the hordes, with limited effect. Somebody else had joined us, I realized- Jada was standing over Anna at the far end of the iron pathway I had carved, slashing left and right with her flaming greatsword, sending up great walls of purple flame to keep them away. _Guess she got her strength restored, somewhere. Glad she’s here._

The ship’s avatar stepped closer, unhurried. It knew it had me at its mercy. “A PRISON FOR YOU TO GROW SENESCENT IN. ONE LAST MERCY, TO GROW OLD AND DIE, FORGOTTEN. BUT YOU BROKE IT. DEFIANT. YOU WILL NOT BREAK THIS ONE.” It glanced around at the chaos with contempt. “LOOK AT THIS RABBLE. ALL YOUR PIECES ARE GATHERED HERE. GROUND TO NOTHING,EXTINGUISHED. THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT THIS TIME.”

Well, it seemed I had an opening. “But you can’t kill me until you’re done putting it up, or I’ll escape. Slip to another world, just like Sean did. So fuck you. I have a couple things I’d like to say.” I started walking.

It seemed indulgent, laughing as I stepped past it. “YOUR WORDS MEAN NOTHING AND LESS THAN NOTHING.”

“Perhaps.” I turned towards the Dog, still frozen in place. Knocking a half dozen monsters spinning away from him with one backhand, I resolved to solve his problem first. “Perhaps not. Zeno’s arrow paradox posits that an object cannot be in motion if it is still in every individual instance of time that you might measure. But I would refute it, as Diogenes did, thusly.” Keeping my eyes locked on the dog, I silently stood and walked in a complete circle. “Let the evidence of your eyes dispel the confusion in your model.” 

The Dog sagged in relief, finally free, flesh knitting back together. “It has been a long week, dear Haley. Shall I-”

I eyed my mother and Skylar, cowering atop a version of me that wasn’t _me,_ anymore, but that I still trusted to defend them with her life.  “Go get Anna. Telantes?” The little mouse that had snuck up Anna’s pants pocket in the earlier confusion had already done his job, I saw, administering a dose of the dilute Swooping Evil venom to the little girl that he embodied the soul of. The blue in her eyes was winking out- I hoped she wouldn’t lose _too_ much- and she collapsed. Asriel shuddered, and it began to fade from his eyes as well. Rather than flee the hordes, his first action was to draw his pistol and fire two shots at Merlin. They went wide, but the wizard turned in startlement. “What are you-”

Asriel’s leopard, always at his side, leapt at the wizard and bore him to the ground beneath the zombie rabble. Asriel waded in among them, a grim look in his eye. “Finishing what I started weeks ago.” Two more shots sounded from within the mob, and I didn’t see either one of them emerge. Much as I appreciated an end to such things, it meant we’d lost one of the three most potent fighters. The Dog was still being ignored, and I saw him darting under the feet of the zombies to retrieve Anna and Telantes, still defended by the raging Jada- I’d have to trust that he would be okay. I signalled to clone me to take off and get our loved ones out of the war zone. A third figure rode her back now, literally and figuratively invisible and laying about himself with a sword of infinite sharpness as she struggled to stay above the rising tide of maddened zombies.

“WHAT IS ALL THIS?” asked the avatar, surveying the chaos, perhaps realizing for the first time that it was no longer fully in control of the Concept or the hordes.

“The world, saving itself,” I said as I closed on it, shoving through the tide of bodies like a thin fog. An efreet leapt on me and I flung it away _too_ hard, tearing it apart in the process. It was hard to hold back, down here. I decided to stop trying- I dropped the human form, and suddenly the street wasn’t _big_ enough anymore. The buildings on either side began to crumble and shatter as my bulk smashed them aside. I covered the remaining distance to the avatar instantly. “It’s a work in progress, I admit.”

“YOUR STRUGGLES ARE POINTLESS, I HOLD THE ONLY TRUMP CARD THAT MATTERS. LOOK-” it indicated the skies. The portals had merged, and finally the whole bulk of the GSV could move itself into this world- vertically. It was a tower of white fields and grey metal over the center of London, ninety-six kilometers tall or more. Underneath it, the storm clouds it had traveled through were dissipating. “I HAVE THE SHIP. THE BARRIER IS COMPLETE. YOU WILL NOT LEAVE HERE ALIVE.”

Nothing holding it back now. What it was saying was true- I had lost the connection to my other dimension entirely. _Feels just like the last time, with Aslan._ But that wasn’t going to stop me. I stepped right up to its face, towering over it, and played my last card. The last simulacra I’d split from myself as I’d fallen, cloaked in every form of invisibility and misdirection it could muster, was finally within range of the ship. With the ship’s fields pulled so close to come through the narrow portal, and the distraction caused by the Coordinator assuming direct control, she had been able to _Dimension Door_ right past the shields and touch down onto the surface of the vessel itself. Apparently that counted as the “Body” of the creature as far as Pathfinder was concerned- for the purposes of the spell I wanted to cast, I was well within range, thanks to the ring gate she carried, linked to one I’d been carrying. “No, you don’t have a ship.” Smashing zombies underfoot, I stretched my neck down and gripped the avatar around the middle by my teeth- no matter how post-human its construction and materials, it was not fast or strong enough to escape _me._ “You have a hulk.” He looked confused. “Like- like in Avengers? But the ship, because I’m going to- oh, never mind.” I was never any good at puns. I bit down, tearing the avatar in half down the middle before it could register what was happening, and triggered the wish I had prepared.

I wish I could describe, after the fact, what it was like to _Mind Switch_ with a four-dimensional consciousness. The process was instantaneous, but in the moment it felt like an eternity. It was like being in the time chamber again, but _not-_ it was simply the speed at which this substrate was able to process information. Our systems were _not_ made to work together- Pathfinder really had no way of representing intelligence on the scale I’d already been representing, much less that of this Mind. The world felt like a soap bubble to me now- but I didn’t have time to worry about any of that. Half of the systems on this ship, that I was now _connected to_ , still resonated with the Concept. I began purging what I could. The infected primary consciousness of the _Not Disquieting At All_ was currently adjusting to _my_ body, back on the ground, and letting it get fully settled would not do at all. I reached down with one of the ship’s displacers and popped it into a Lagrange orbit. All the Strength and Hit Dice in the _world_ weren’t going to let it fly or breathe in space- and inhabiting my body wouldn’t give it the ability to cast spells. But it wouldn’t suffocate any time soon.

I popped the beleaguered defenders up onto one of the near-infinite hangars that made up the outer layers of the ship. Anna, Skylar, Telantes, Greg, Mom, Dog, and other Haley looked around in bewilderment. Jada still had her greatsword raised in a defensive position, but backed down when no new threats were evident. Merlin and Asriel, I couldn’t find. Dead or disappeared, and I didn’t much care which. There wasn’t much I could do for Holmes- he’d had no neural lace, which was necessary for Culture backups and resurrections. But hopefully he’d died before whatever “Barrier” had come down and whatever _thing_ was happening to our souls hadn’t happened to his. I didn’t know how hyperspace was _supposed_ to look, but- there were definitely no holes here, no ways out that I could see. 

The zombies swarming below didn’t stop tearing each other apart- Matt’s storms, already gathering in Scotland and swiftly expanding southwards would soon stop that, and I began contacting Thunderbirds for displacement worldwide to aid in it, but we had another problem. I grabbed a ship’s avatar, altered it enough to look like me, and plopped it on the deck nearby. “Take a breather, everyone.”

They jumped and turned. “Haley? Is that you?” asked my mother. “It’s so hard to tell, with all these bodies.” Other Haley gave me a single nod.

I sighed. “Yeah Mom, it’s me. Hopefully there won’t be too many more. Let’s take a few minutes to catch up, okay?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that a few minutes were likely all we had. The last commands in the ship’s databanks were easy enough to interpret. As soon as it had crossed the portal and the Coordinator had completed whatever barrier it had been working on, it had begun the process to induce instability in the local star. The sun was going supernova, and I had no way to reverse it.

I supposed that was what it had meant when it said our struggles were pointless. Even should we survive the supernova, and on this ship we really _might_ \- we would all die _eventually_ , locked away behind another soul barrier. Ten minutes or a thousand years- for us, the wider war was lost the second the barrier was completed.

There was only one trump left to play, and it happened to be on a planet with minutes left to live, at most. Whatever it was that I’d bought the time for Sean to do, he’d need to do it _really_ soon.


	50. Chapter 50

\----

Sean And Hermione, In The Ministry

\----

The Ministry had seen better days. Internally, it was structured like some kind of overgrown subway station, all forty-foot black stone arches and cavernous cliff’s-edges bordered on the walls by columns of geometrically impossible offices- every window looking in on a different corner, even the ones that were two feet apart. The place should have felt damp and claustrophobic, but there were a variety of domes and skylights giving the whole thing a more open feel.

None of that was what caught my eye. Rather, it was the animated statues that came bull-rushing at us the second we stepped through the door. Hermione squealed, still under the cloak, and I stepped forward on instinct to take them apart even as they raised their giant bronze fists to squash us. At the last second a voice called out. “Hold!” They paused instantly, cut off and as still as if they’d been sculpted that way, in the very act of assaulting intruders to the place. “Friend or foe?” Called the mysterious interloper, and I looked around the base of the giant metal centaur in front of me to see who was calling.

“My god,” I breathed. “The ministry hasn’t fallen?” The walls were chipped and blackened, some of the skylights were shattered- and the statues were on the move, of course- but around the doors to the lower levels, a perimeter still existed. They’d held out in here for four full days, by the look of it. A cadre of aurors, wizard cops essentially, and a smattering of haggard looking civilians were still manning barricades at that side of the room. One of them had their wand to their throat- projecting to me, no doubt. “Uh, friend! Friend,” I answered, careful not to implicate Hermione even while trying to get my wits about me. “You’re all in terrible danger and I need to find a blue-eyed girl who’s down in the lower levels already.”

Most of them were busy maintaining _Patronus_ charms, which explained why the dementors outside hadn’t swarmed the place yet, but one of the biggest of the black-robed aurors came marching towards me. She was wide-set like a brick wall and had a look on her face that said she could keep holding those gates all _year_ if she had to. “Amelia Bones, Department of Magical Law Enforcement. None of the brainwashed have made it inside. We’re sheltering half the ministry down here. You think we don’t know about the danger? We can see what’s going on topside as well as you. Were you with the dragon or the genies?”

My heart beat faster to hear _any_ of that referred to in the past tense. “Sean, uh Peakes. I _am_ with the dragon. Currently. We’ve been at Hogwarts. The siege is broken but the war has shifted, the archway in the Department of Mysteries is the next target. Haley, that’s the dragon, is keeping the heat off us but I need to get down there.” I carefully made no mention of the invisible girl at my side.

She crossed her arms, eyebrow raised at my mention of the arch that _should_ have been a state secret, but unconvinced. “Bullshit. Dumbledore would have sent us warning.”

I sighed. “I am the warning. Dumbledore is dead.” I held up the Elder Wand for her to inspect. She recognized it and gasped, the first sign of distress I’d seen on her. A murmur ran through the rest of the wizards on the other side of the room. “I really need to get down there- practically nothing else matters, at this point. You can send an escort if you want. Likely this room will fall in the next few minutes. I’m… sorry, for what it’s worth.”

She recovered quickly enough. “It’s not worth much. You can’t go, but I’ll send two men that I _trust_ down to check things out. You want to help, you can hold the line up here with me.” I considered, trying not to look at where I knew Hermione was. I felt her hand take mine and squeeze. She understood- this was going to be her opportunity, and her trial.

I wanted to reassure her, to be with her. I’d barely had time to teach her anything in the last four days. But in the end- “It won’t be about magic. Whoever goes down there has got to keep their wits about them. Whatever’s waiting for them, it _will_ be beatable. Somehow.” I only hoped she could understand my warning to her. I nodded at the enormous woman. “Alright then. I’ll help you hold as long as I can.” We strode towards the barricades and the bedraggled last defenders of the Ministry. Up close, they were a sorry sight- robes torn to pieces, injured, hungry and tired. They’d been under near-constant siege for days and it showed in the way their eyes and wands followed me, even when I offered no threat. Bones walked off to select two of her team, Hermione no doubt close behind, and I began preparing a few last… surprises, for the hordes that would be bearing down on us at any second. As I’d told my wife- the time for nonlethal measures was long past. If we won, we’d set it to rights. If we _lost-_ well, the universe was screwed anyway. I set out to make Moody proud. I didn’t have long to wait.

\----

Hermione rode the elevator. As big moments went, this didn’t feel like much of one to her. Not that she was complaining- she would much rather be invisible and crouched behind two burly aurors on her way to her final conflict than facing a horde of zombies. It was just- they even had that tinny _music_ playing in here, and it was very hard to feel anything but silly as she stood there hoping she wasn’t too late to save the world. Fawkes coo’d softly into her ear, too quietly to be heard by the men, even as close as they were standing.

“You think there’s anything to it?” Asked one auror of the other.

“The way this week is gone? I’d be more surprised if there _wasn’t_. ‘Constant Vigilance,’ at’s what Alastor always says. We go in wands-up, yeah?” They nodded at each other and got ready. At least _they_ were taking this seriously, Hermione thought. 

Not, apparently, seriously enough. There was a rumble from up above, and the elevator shook in its housing. “Kicking off up above, I bet” said one of the two, glancing nervously upwards. “Maybe we should-” but whatever his suggestion was going to be, it came too late. With a _clang_ the elevator began to drop into freefall, and both men cursed and threw hexes at the walls. Hermione was nearly thrown to the floor as its plummet was arrested, and the doors were pulled open _from the outside._ A glance at the floor indicator told her they were on six- “Brocéliande,” the sign read. The men threw up shields as the doors were torn open but it did them no good- the blue-eyed, red-skinned giant standing outside the elevator sneered at them, and thrust his trident into the space so hard that it went clear through one auror, pinning him to the back wall with a sickening crunch. He clutched at the flaming metal and tried to summon words, but went still.

The other auror let out a wordless shout of anger and blew the efreet back from the doors, leaping through to take the fight to them- Hermione bit back her own cry of despair and tried to muffle the screech from Fawkes as she followed, only glancing back at the dead man once as she strode into the space. It was hundreds of feet tall, built like the intersection at the center of a cathedral, with more sunlit windows in the domes- despite their depth underground. Where the four surrounding chapel-like structures intersected, there was a tree- floating wholly in the air, branches stretched above and roots completely exposed below in an odd visual symmetry. Petals drifted throughout the room on winds that affected only them- and coming through tremendous holes punched in the ceiling was an army of blue-eyed monsters, robots, and dementors. At their head was one man whom she recognized. The wizard who had taunted Haley after the bomb had hit her. The one who her mentor thought might have been _Merlin_. He looked like he’d had a rough day- while still capable of flight, he was clutching a bloody hole in his side. As he drew closer she saw he was covered in lacerations and his robes were torn to pieces. His eyes looked wild and he was shouting instructions to his remaining minions as they flew. “Go! Go! To the arch! It’s the only way out of here now, damn them all! Asriel won’t bury _me_ in a tide of bodies!” Then he seemed to notice the pathetic resistance lined up against him on this floor. He flicked a hand towards them and dismissed them from his attention.

The remaining auror growled and threw up additional shields, backing towards the elevator as Hermione threw herself to the side. A barrage of rail rifle shots from the brainwashed drones battered at him, breaking portions of his defenses away and drawing blood- and in one case, punching a hole clean through his thigh. But the flames were what really taxed him- the magical fire of the Efreet burned right through his defenses and sent him howling to one side, slapping at his robes as he tried to put them out. He had seconds to live, at most. She had to _do_ something!

Fawkes poked her in the side, urging her to let him out of the cloak- she obliged and he flashed at the older wizard with a cry of fury and a burst of flames. Merlin threw up his hands in defense, crying out, but the angry phoenix still raked his face hard enough that it looked like he might have claimed an eye. His cries drew the attention of his minions, pulling some heat off of the embattled auror, but now _Fawkes_ was in the line of fire, and despite his blipping around the room he wouldn’t last long.

If only she had more magic! Sean had said it wouldn’t be _about_ that, but- if she was just strong enough to overpower this force! In the corner several of the drones had come together and were using their gravity weapons like rail rifles, _punching_ a hole through to the next level- the Department of Mysteries, she knew. Her destination. She could just run and throw herself down the hole invisibly, but- to leave this man and Fawkes to die? She would never.

_Brocéliande,_ the name of this place had read. That had to mean something- she racked her brain. Something from the magical histories of Britain came to her- of course! The last resting place of Merlin, the rumors went- trapped in… in a _tree!_ “That man… he isn’t _our_ Merlin, is he?” she mused, thinking of what Sean had told her of worlds within worlds, examining the gently rotating tree as the firefight raged behind her. The auror still battling the scattered drones and genies had found some second wind with the appearance of Fawkes, and was holding his own despite dripping wounds and mounting damage to the room itself. A plan began to form in her mind, and she ran to the tree itself.

Whipping the cloak off, she called to the old wizard. “Hey! Merlin! Over here!” His head whipped around, one eye still shut tight after the damage done by the fiery bird.

“ _You_ ,” he snarled. “Even here, their narrative sparring entraps us! What’s your game, girl?” A staff appeared in his hand- he’d _definitely_ not been holding it before- and he swung it at her. She ducked behind the tree as a blast of razor-edged wind tore great gouges out of the floor around her. The tree itself was unmoved- as it should be, if it truly was designed the way she thought. “Are _you_ the one they sent down here, to defend the veil?” He laughed cruelly. She could hear him drawing closer as he spoke. “An untrained little girl, not yet come into her power? I’d thought the husband would be brave enough to come on his _own_ , at least. If _you_ are the last line of defense before Gretchen- so be it. I’ll make it quick for you, child.” He was on the other side of the trunk from her.

She darted out. “ _Accio Robes!”_ The older wizard’s clothes lurched forward and towards her- and the tree. He put out one hand to brace himself against it, snorting in contempt- a snort that changed to a gasp of alarm, when his hand _stuck_. And began to sink in.

“More than just _a_ girl,” she taunted. “A girl who’s read the whole _library_ before she even _got_ to Hogwarts. _Brocéliande_ , that was the name of this floor. That was the name of the forest where _you_ get trapped, forever. Some legends say you were stuck in a _tree_. I guess the wizards dug it up.” He snarled and shoved against the tree, trying to free himself- but each point of contact only stuck more firmly. He was halfway in, now, and still struggling. As his body passed that point, a hand shot _out-_ and gripped him. Hermione thought she knew whose it was. “I don’t know which story you came from, but in the end you only wanted to save yourself. I hope the Merlin who’s still _in_ the tree has something to say, about that.” The hand and the wizard were drawn within, and the entire tree _rippled_ , like the surface was a disturbed pool. 

Absent the wizard’s control, the minions in the room subsided. But it was too late for the auror- he was slumped against the wall, Fawkes sitting sadly on his head. At least there was a look of peace on his face as the floor beneath him turned red from his wounds. There was no time to mourn, but she would remember him- _both_ of them- later. In the meantime, she needed to get down that hole to her final destination.

Behind her the tree, last prison of _two_ Merlins now, began to glow and vibrate.

\----

The second the elevator doors had closed, they were on us. The doors of the Ministry on the opposite side of the room burst open and a tide of dementors blasted through, like a crashing black wave of death. We formed a near-solid wall of _Patronus_ charms, my silver-white dragon leading the charge, and tore hundreds of them to pieces. But there were just too many- and behind them, the green-eyed hordes, now fully feral. I had just lived through this nightmare once in the tower at Hogwarts- it seemed I was doomed to relive it a second time.

Amelia Bones was next to me, taking a human or red-skinned efreet off their feet with every blast. I swept my magic through our ranks, her draconic form tearing apart the few dementors that had managed to penetrate the barriers and begin latching onto the defenders. The zombies couldn’t produce any return fire, being consumed by not one but _two_ dueling memetic impulses, blue and green, but then- they didn’t need to. They were nearly infinite. 

I triggered the first of the traps I’d prepared. A monomolecular cable of near-infinite strength, strung from one side of the room to the other at neck height. It was already sectioning the zombies that tried to force their way past it, but that was just the beginning of what I had prepared. I spoke a word of power and it _shattered_ , sending individual sections careening through the room like detached helicopter rotors. It was like the worst industrial accident I could imagine- the gore was indescribable and in the end it scarcely mattered. More simply flowed in over the blood slick tiles to replace them. The entire city of London was committed to this attack. Then _he_ burst into the room, howling through the doors like the grand-daddy of all dementors, and I knew the time of our defensive line was short. 

It was Voldemort, of course. _Of course he couldn’t just lay down and die at Hogwarts._ Snape was dead or completely subsumed by the meme, and the Dark Lord was in full control of his body, cackling and dealing out death like a whirlwind. I dismissed the Patronus, mentally consigning those I hadn’t yet rescued from the dementors to their fates, and ran out ahead of the lines. Forming a great wedge of force I plowed through the section of zombies immediately between us, and with my magic giving force to my legs, _leapt_ at him, connecting and knocking him out of the air. He wasn’t the least bit surprised to see me. “ _Ah_ , my faithful student! Putting some of my lessons to work, I see! Pity I didn’t teach you everything.” He caught fire, every exposed inch of him, and I howled at the feeling of my skin burning and splitting. He laughed at my pain. “Should have killed me when you had the _chance,_ you fool!”

I was flung loose, trailing smoke and fire. Suddenly I knew how my wife felt in these situations. Just between me and the thoughts in my head- I didn’t disagree with him. But something had told me, when I had him at gunpoint, that he had one final act to play in this drama. And now, here he was. Even as I burned and fell, I felt a kind of serenity- the knowledge that pieces were falling into place just as they should. Further explosions were rocking the building when I landed. I could only pray that Hermione was alright elsewhere. My magic was knitting me back together as I stood, shakily. The other defenders of the hall were dying more swiftly now, the zombie hordes having reached and overwhelmed their first barricades. With another word I activated the second trap. A wall of fire swept up from nowhere- on the side facing the defenders, cool to the touch. But on this side? The zombies closest were blasted to ash in an instant. I was fifty feet away, and the heat was re-igniting my burns. I screamed in agony, but hurried to sink into the floor with another spell. Voldemort caught my action, and did the same in the ceiling. Just in time- the wall _flashed_ forward, sweeping from one end of the hall to the other, and just like that the zombies were cleared a second time, reduced to ash and blackened husks. We re-emerged from our hiding places but now the other defenders were free to attack the few Efreet who had survived the second trap by virtue of their fire immunity, and Voldemort himself. Amelia Bones rallied to my aid personally, even as I picked myself up. I finally got enough air in my lungs to taunt Voldemort right back. “There is no killing you, you old idiot. Or _me_. Haven’t you figured that out yet? How many of us are practically immortal now? Everything that happens here-” I gestured around the hall- “is a duel of philosophies. Your isolationism, your violence and terror, versus our humanism. The belief that if we just hold the line long enough-” I gasped in relief as Amelia’s healing supplemented my own, bringing me back to my feet- “they’ll grow enough to save themselves.”

“Lunacy,” he sneered. Snuffing my fire at the doorways and casually obliterating two more defenders, he advanced while another wave of zombies poured in. “Every life you touch is doomed the second you touch it. You have saved _no-one_. Your wife? That child you think of as your _first pupil_? You haven’t even seen what’s happening _above_ , have you.” He gestured and a section of the ceiling cleared, revealing the freshly gathered storm clouds of Matt’s thunderbirds. But beyond and through them the towering ship dominated all- and beyond _it_ , the sun was still visible. Something was _wrong_ with it. It was rippling, expanding. “This world has _minutes_ to live, _Peakes_. The arch and what lies beyond is my only hope, now. I’ll rip the ability to narrate from your still-breathing _corpse_ and I’ll use it myself. But this world is going to die with you.” Amelia rushed at him, conjuring a drilling hex of some sort, and he slapped her contemptuously aside with a burst of force. “There is no power on earth you could grant, that would give these pathetic remnants a chance against _me_.”

A shudder through the building from below caught both of our attention. The floor _rocked_ \- something was happening in the lower levels. But my attention wasn’t the same as that of my _magic._ While he’d been taunting, it had reached out and found the statues at the entrance. In his distraction now, the bronze centaur managed to grab him- and none too gently, either. He snarled as it pulled him back away from me, towards the center of the grand room. “We keep trying to explain to you,” I said calmly, “That it isn’t _about_ you. Or us. We don’t have to grant or withhold anything.” I paused, feeling sheepish. “I admit, I didn’t get that until recently. I thought my wife was wrong. That we’d have to flip some switch or make some grand personal stand, in the end, to convince the world not to die.” Speaking of grand personal stands- the floor beneath him _exploded_ , as I’d half expected it to when I’d caught a hint of Merlin’s aura down below. It blasted upwards with the power of a small inferno. I took shelter behind a buttress in the wall, but Voldemort and the remains of the statue were blown clear into the darkening sky. Looking down into the crater, I could see a solid seven or eight levels of Ministry below me, to a shattered tree still floating in the midst of a vast cathedral. “But that wasn’t the case. We just had to play a role- take the lead for a while, help where we could, and keep faith in people.” I couldn’t see her below me. But I knew she was down there, somewhere. “It could have been any one of them who saved the world, in the end. A soldier or a hobbit or a potions professor. But I think, _this_ time… it’s going to be a clever young lady, in her first year at wizard school.”

He came roaring back even as the cleansing rains began to fall, flinging fire and death as he flew. The scattered last dregs of the defenders fired back at him, but it wasn’t _their_ magic that held him, in the end. It was the zombies, eyes now clear for the first time in a week. They _remembered_ what he’d done, once the _Obliviate_ rain hit them and his version of the meme was lifted. And they knew him for what he was. A thousand wands were raised towards him, from the street above the Ministry, from the hall where they’d been swarming. From every side. A thousand different spells hit him at once. “ _None of this matters! There will be no tomorrow for any of you!”_ he shrieked, as his corporeal body- well, Snape’s, I guessed- was torn into ragged pieces.

“There’s always a tomorrow,” I said. “It’s just that sometimes, it’s not the tomorrow you expect. Personally? That’s what keeps me turning the pages.” I headed downwards to find my protégé.

\----

Gretchen couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept. She stood in front of the great stone arch, its ragged black veil blowing in a breeze she couldn’t feel, and wondered if there’d be a chance for peace on the other side. Somehow she doubted it. Every inch of her mind was screaming at her to walk through, to take the exit, to cut off this route before anyone _else_ could use it- but her body didn’t move forward. She had _won_ , all she had to do was reach out and take the prize, but-

“You don’t want to, do you.” It was a voice behind her. A voice she’d heard before- in her _head_ , as well as in person. A voice she’d imagined from the books she’d loved so much as a child. She turned. Hermione was there, Fawkes the phoenix on her shoulder- looking every inch like the witch that Gretchen had ached to be, once upon a time. “You don’t want to leave this world. The one place you wanted to be, more than anywhere else. So much that you got your wish- and then something happened that turned it into a nightmare for you.” A great hole stood in the ceiling behind her- she’d been so focused on her objective that she hadn’t even heard it being made, or the explosion that had torn the roof off the building. The rains from above were already beginning to drip down.

Gretchen tried to deny it. “ _This_ wasn’t the place I wanted to be. The world I read about, that _you_ lived in… it was magical. Beautiful. This is just…”

Hermione shrugged. “Awful? Full of death, and destruction? I don’t know how my life _might_ have gone. But- I think that, if you’re living _in_ the story, it’s never quite as much fun as it looks from the outside. It’s up to you to decide if that’s better than the alternative.”

That was puzzling. Weren’t they supposed to fight now? Gretchen looked at the other girl. She was battered and bruised, but she had _magic_. It wouldn’t even be a contest. “You aren’t just going to take the choice from me?”

Hermione glanced at her, and the arch, and then back the way she’d come. At the _rain_. Something about it tickled Gretchen’s recent memories. “The way I see it, you’ve had all your choices taken since this started. But when I looked over your shoulder, I saw _two_ images in that mirror. Two answers, to the ‘Way out’ you were seeking. The arch or the rain. Leave this place, or stay here with us.” She crossed her arms and Fawkes on her shoulder _coo’ed_ softly. “I won’t take that choice from you.” Then she muttered, “I could _use_ some more female friends anyway. Boys, honestly.”

Gretchen didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. To come all this way, to be so close to what her mind was telling her was a victory- and yet, for the desires of her _heart_ to be pulling her towards that strange hole in the roof, and the water that fell through it. “How- how can I decide? How can I know what’s right?”

The other witch considered that question. “Well. If it was me, and I couldn’t trust my mind… I’d ask someone I trusted to decide for me. But you barely know me, so that’s not-” Hermione jumped in surprise as Gretchen practically materialized in front of her, she’d moved so fast.

Gretchen stared at her with her big glowing blue eyes filled with longing. “I trust you. I’ve read everything about you. You _always_ do what’s right. Please- “ she held out her hands- “show me what to do.” The Concept in her head was howling, raging at the walls of her mind. But _it_ wasn’t _Hermione_. Just this once, she could ignore it.

Hermione smiled at her, at _her_ , and took her hands. Together, they stepped backwards into that cold falling water. 

“Oh,” said Gretchen softly, in surprise. “It’s- I _remember_ now.” She collapsed into Hermione’s arms, looking up at her. “This was-” words escaped her, for a moment. She settled eventually on “Thank you. Thank you.” And then sleep finally took her, and she lay still.

\----

I found them together, soaked to the bone, at the bottom of the crater made by Merlin’s passing and Voldemort’s demise. Hermione held the other girl, now deep in unconsciousness, in her arms. She looked at me when I came down the hole, Fawkes spreading his wings above her in a vain attempt to ward off the rain. “What do we do?”

I indicated the sky above. “The ship was more dangerous than we thought. Sun’s going nova.” I pulled the walkie-talkie out of my pocket. “Ground control to Major Haley. Two- no, sorry, _three_ to beam up. And an arch.”

There was a brief instant where we felt like we were inside a mirrored ball that contained the entire universe, somehow, and then we were standing on a deck of that vast ship, looking out at a beautiful blue sky courtesy the layer after layer of fields. The gang was all here, I noted- even some that I didn’t think had been _in_ the story up to this point. It was practically a convention in here. The arch itself _thudded_ to the ground behind us. “Oh, hello Skylar, Margaret” I said, indicating Haley’s mother. She blinked at me but was otherwise so overwhelmed that she didn’t immediately respond.

“How did you know I was the ship?” asked an avatar that looked like a surprisingly close facsimile of my wife. The others paused and looked at us, even Jada and Matt, who had apparently been squaring up for some kind of battle right there in the hangar.

“Well I knew it wasn’t going to _kill_ you,” I said, with what I hoped was absolute confidence. She grinned and threw a hug around me. I returned it with as much strength as I had left in me.

We filled each other in as quickly as we could. Haley’s fight, the arrival of the Coordinator, the existence of the barrier and the supernova- and the final fates of Holmes, Merlin, and Asriel. And Snape-slash-Voldemort, of course. It was not a short series of tales, but we hurried it as much as we could. “So what do we do now?” Asked Jada, cutting right to the point. “Watch the world get eaten by a supernova, assuming we even _survive_ it, and then float through space forever? Much as I enjoy _some_ of your company, I think I’d prefer the tender mercies of the void, to that.”

I shook my head. “No. Haley, do you remember earlier, when you said you couldn’t fight this battle without thinking about tomorrow?”

She clearly did. “Of course, and _you_ looked like you’d just thought of something. Are you going to tell me, or do we have to watch the world flash-fry first?”

I smiled and said two words. “Groundhog Day.”

Her avatar’s eyes widened and she actually shuddered a little in shock, then glanced at the arch we had rescued. “Of course. _Of course_. It can go anywhere, right?” I nodded. “So why not back in time, to do this over again? Do it _right_? Make sure nobody gets hurt? That’s brilliant. But who’s going to be our looper?” She asked. 

“Me,” Hermione said without hesitation, stepping up to the portal. How funny, not even a full day ago I’d have fought her on that point. But I got it now. It didn’t matter what age she was. It was _her story_ , here and now, had been since the moment Harriet abandoned it- maybe it had been before, maybe she’d have saved the _first_ narrative, and I just hadn’t let it go far enough. Haley and I were just tourists here.

The others were still staring at this little drama in various states of confusion, but I smiled at her. “You’re gonna do great, kid. You understand what needs to change, before the loops end?”

She threw a hug around me with surprising strength for such a young girl, and the bird on her shoulder _cawed_ loudly and spread its wings. “I think so. Based on what you were saying just now it’s the… the barrier, right? We need to reach this same point, but without the thing that will trap us all here when we die.”

Haley nodded agreement. “I doubt any of us but you is going to remember past iterations of the loop. If you do nothing it will likely play out just like this. Understand that when you _do_ break it, things are going to lock into place on that last run. Make it as close to perfect as you can.”

No pressure on the kid or anything, wife! But Hermione stepped back and gave us a brave smile. The arch rippled behind her, and I could almost _hear_ the voices from the other side. It sounded like… like a young boy waking up alone in an empty house, with an invitation to his first day at Hogwarts. Like second chances. She took a deep breath, and stepped through it, vanishing from our world.

We glanced at each other. “What now?” asked Matt, looking to Haley.

“Now we get out of this world as fast as possible and take our places in the next,” she said. A rumble cut through the atmosphere of the ship. She’d lowered the shields. I closed my eyes, and found her hand in mine. At least this time it would be quick.

The supernova came, and we died, and we _won_.

\----

Inside a crystalline bubble in the midst of a sea of great spheres, a world came to an end. One of the little dancing lights inside of it went _backwards_ in some dimension that was hard to register, even as all of the others were flung outside and into that great crystalline shell. They stuck fast there, for a moment, but then- the world reconstituted itself. Reverted to an earlier state, one that demanded their presence. They were drawn back down to resume their courses once again, and that ultimate fate at the crystal wall was staved off once more.

_We’re doing it_ , I felt more than thought, body still linked with Haley’s somehow. I didn’t just mean that as a victory cry. We _were_ doing it, the two of us. With my perception of this strange world I was the navigation, and she was the engine- the force that could turn back the whole world. We steered the ship of the universe backwards in time and it felt… it felt _right._ Like this was what we had been made for. _More than just narrators. Is this why the Coordinator fears us?_ Haley _pushed_ and I _turned_ and the whole world of _The Cauldron Stirred_ revolved, again and again. Faster and faster. _Living up to its name,_ I thought. I could only think in the interim between each revolution- my soul would get sucked down at the beginning and launched back out at the end for another pass, devoid of any memory of the time in-between, but that was alright. I knew Hermione would come through.

But there was a concern growing in me. It was… _using_ something of Haley, to reverse time like this. She was vast and powerful, but even now she didn’t have an infinite supply of whatever energy it was that was powering this transformation. We were burning her for fuel. I held her hand as she diminished- I’d never let go, and I _knew_ Hermione would finish.

  
I couldn’t say how many times we revolved. Hundreds? Thousands? We whirled so fast that the shell containing us all _creaked_ and _splintered_ , but did not break. Haley was down to almost nothing now, barely bigger than when I’d first seen her in this way, after my _first_ death. Then the world spun a final time, and with a tremendous _crash-_


	51. Interlude - The Return

\----

Hermione, The Perfect Run

Day 1

\----

Hermione woke with a start, screaming. “Aaaah!” She could still feel the blade in her ribs and the fall from the tower. _What were those things?_ After so much time, she’d finally made her move on the barrier ritual- and despite everything, despite fifty years in these loops to train and prepare- the man in the jean jacket and his _monsters_ had made her feel like a child, all over again. Dying had been only a temporary setback for her, over these loops- though now, she knew, it had burned the last of a resource she could not replenish. This would be the last loop, one way or another.

She took a deep breath and tried to center herself. Guided meditation had been such a big boon over the years. Guided meditation, and her friends- who despite all this time, all these iterations of the same three months, could still surprise her. It was time to surprise _them,_ she thought with a smile. This was it, the last one. The perfect run. She stood up from her bed and her phoenix, Tesimond appeared on her shoulder, looking somewhat confused- he hadn’t existed, seconds before. She patted his head. “Sorry, you keep getting dragged around with my soul when it resets. You’ll get the hang of living in a moment.” _He_ had been a big help too, ever since she’d learned the secrets of the phoenixes from Dumbledore. She summoned her wand from nowhere at all, and deftly disabled the wards against underage magic placed upon her. Then she teleported to Sean’s starting point- the loop was actually synced to _his_ waking, not hers.

It was an empty room in an empty Muggle house on the outskirts of London. There was a white owl tapping on the window with a letter in its’ beak. The boy himself was still sleeping in his bed. It was nice- peaceful. She took a minute to soak it in. Eventually, she spoke gently to wake him. “I don’t usually get to see where you start from.” He jumped, eyes snapping open, still awkward in the child’s body he hadn’t got used to yet. She saw the familiar emotions crossing his face- confusion, then triumph at having made it into the story, then confusion again at _her_ appearance, along with a dim sense of recognition. He and Haley, alone of all her companions, seemed to retain a sense of that first iteration. But they kept none of the rest. She continued as if she wasn’t watching this play out for the dozenth time. “It’s awfully lonely- didn’t the original narrator give you a backstory? It makes me wonder how much of the rest of our world is just… set-dressing. Like, if I could dodge our narrative for even a minute, would every house I entered be empty? Do _I_ even exist in the moments that aren’t written? It’s downright existential.” She said all this with good humor- these thoughts had crossed her mind so many times that they had left well-worn paths, by now.

He turned in bed and reddened slightly at a girl his age standing in his room, with frizzy brown hair and a distant look in her eyes, and a bird made of _fire_ perched on her shoulder. Tesimonde took his cue, and opened his mouth to _CAW-_

And Sean collapsed back against his headboard, just as he always did, the recollections of that first trip through Hogwarts crashing back down on him. The first whirlwind quest for knowledge, the use of magic- _magic-_  she smiled as he reached out and she saw, in his aura, his magic come to him again. Still the same silvery dragon, after all these loops. Her own had taken the form of a playful gryffin, when she had finally learned to cast the _Patronus_. “Hermione,” he gasped. “How long-”

Time for the intro speech, then. She held up her hand and ticked off fingers one by one. “To answer your questions- I lost track but in the hundreds of loops, and decades at least. No, you won’t remember any but the first- you seem to keep that one- and the current run. All of you enter at precisely the same points you did the first time around, and it _did_ take me quite some time to figure out where all of those points were. Things will play out exactly as they did the first time barring our intervention- and no, I don’t know what that implies about the original narrator but she’s definitely not still around. This is your story now- or Gretchen’s.”

She could see more urgent questions building in his eyes and she eventually sighed and relented. “Yes, it has been terribly lonely and I _have_ missed you. Yes, I would like a hug.” She paused, and he took the cue to get up and offer her some human contact. While they hugged she continued. “No, I have not had success with the source of the barrier. Well, okay, that last isn’t entirely true- I just got used to saying that. We _did_ finally find the ritual that summons it, on the far side of the world from London- but the man there killed us despite everything, and I haven’t gone back. Carrying on- yes, I will spend the next month prior to Hogwarts training you, I’ve gotten _quite_ good at getting you up to speed, and then you will need to leverage as much of your time with Voldemort and Dumbledore as you can to pry more information out of their skulls. In the last fifty or so years, we’ve gotten a tremendous part of what they know, but they have… hidden depths.” She looked at me with excitement shining in her eyes. “But this is the last run. I can _feel_ it, Sean. I know every beat that needs to happen, except that last. You and your friends are going to be key with that man.” Some of the fire left her eyes. “He just- there was something _about_ him, even with that stupid jean jacket and odd smile.”

Her words sent a chill through Sean that no magic could warm. “Flagg. _Flagg was here?_ ” Then he dismissed it for more pressing concerns. “No, wait, we can cover that. Hermione, Haley is-”

She stopped him. “You tell me about her every time. And I can see it, too. When she arrives, she’s- well, you’ll see for yourself in a couple of months. I knew we were running out of loops. Everything that needs to happen can be done with just the rest of us, but- we can still offer her some tricks. She’ll be okay, Sean. Tell me about that strange man. When I found him, he seemed very surprised to see me- but he talked his way close and when I died- well, I never even saw it coming.”

He nodded, shuddering. “Yeah, that’s him. He’s originally from the _Dark Tower_ series but he’s convenient enough that I think he gets used everywhere. And he knows more than he should. The Coordinator has been using him- maybe _forever_. When we we first met him, he’d coaxed Aslan into invading our world and used the assault as cover. He was going to claim the tower that Aslan was turning into the throne of the world. I think he meant to destroy it, and our world with it. I don’t know why- his goals are the Coordinators.  And he’s _very_ scared of the Coordinator.” He paused and thought hard. “Narratively he’s a horror story. Nearly unbeatable because it’s always scarier if he comes back. Convenient, because he can be anywhere at any time, have nearly any power. But he’s a morality play, not a slasher flick. Ultimately if his motivations are revealed, he’ll fail. The fact that we know who he is now-” he looked up at her. “It means we can beat him.”

She smiled at him with deep affection. _Always the optimist, even when you don’t remember_. She would be glad to be out of here, to finally work alongside the others as an _equal_ , instead of always a guide and a mentor. “Okay. Let’s get you up to speed.” Opening the same extradimensional pocket she’d retrieved her wand from, she removed dozens of vials and a pensieve. “Fundamentals of magic 101, then we’ll go into the mysteries that can only be passed directly.”

\----

Hermione

1st day at Hogwarts

\----

The foundations of magic, as they had worked out through trial and error across the decades, were far simpler and more powerful than even Sean had dreamed in his initial foray. Stripped of the cruft of the British educational system and refined with years of practice, she gave Sean everything he needed to reach her level, and more. But the mastery would take time- by the time of the siege he’d be ready to ask additional questions of Voldemort and Dumbledore, should any arise. And hopefully, with further years, he would truly come to _understand_ magic the way she had. She practically flowed with it now, alive to it in ways she could never have dreamed as a child. The world was made up of it, and with the slightest _touch_ she could reach out and alter it to her whim- but she kept to her meditations and restrained herself. This wasn’t a cutting-loose run, this was The Perfect Run, and she wouldn’t risk it.

In the meantime Hermione had to complete many aspects of the initial setup herself. She was very busy during the first year’s boat ride across the lake to Hogwarts which was just as well because she’d have been bored otherwise- she’d done it a hundred times before she’d learned how to make an illusory stand-in. Her first order of business was to perform a variant of Sean’s anti-memetic spell on Draco, with Sean as the subject. The little prat wouldn’t be able to see, hear about, or _think of_ his erstwhile love interest. It neatly defused the romance time bomb without upsetting other events- who would think to question that a Malfoy took no notice of a random Hufflepuff, even an unusually talented one?

Her next target was Harry- though she had to be far subtler there, both to avoid upsetting the balance _and_ to avoid Dumbledore’s detection- he was always especially vigilant about the boy. Hermione felt a twinge of guilt- early on she had tried to strip away the interest between Harry and Snape, but he had been _obsessed_ \- coming up with elaborate plots and theories about potions professor being a spy for Voldemort, trying to rope her and Ron into elaborate stalking schemes. She had gone further and further with her antimemes until she’d ruined a whole loop by blanking his mind- Sean had laughed, when she complained to him, and explained that Harry was reverting to the _original_ plot of the story. Apparently he was just destined to clash with the ill-tempered potions professor. These days, she left it at that.

Her immediate jobs done, she returned to her meditation. It would have been nice to strike up a conversation with the others, but after so many years it was difficult to feel terribly connected to the ramblings of children- even those she felt she should have been closest to, in another life. _Her_ peers awaited in the months ahead.

One of the nice things about the loop they were on was that _most_ events were fairly mutable. The only elements that needed to fall in place were the entrances of all key players. Disrupting the romance subplots caused the romantic narrative to fail in roughly the same time as the first run, which meant there was a great deal of leeway in who else had to make it to the final battle. Voldemort, she had discovered after much testing, did _not_. As she and Sean took their seats- she in Ravenclaw, he in Hufflepuff- and Dumbledore stood up to give his “Welcome to Hogwarts” address, a curious thing happened. Professor Quirrel, leaning forward in his chair, found that the back of his turban had come loose and snagged on the Headmaster’s belt. Scrambling backwards to fix it, he only made it worse, and he found himself chasing the older wizard down the length of the staff table as his head-wrapping came apart, exposing the disgusting face of Voldemort attached to the back of his head for all to see.

Hermione and Sean kept calm and hid under their respective tables during the ensuing firefight. To the untrained or even the expert eye of a classically-educated wizard, they did nothing. But all of Voldemort’s deadliest spells missed their mark. All of his attempts to take hostages were blocked by convenient wardrobe or furniture malfunctions. All of his grand attempts at escape- through flight, or turning into a swarm of locusts, or exploding into a fireball- found themselves stymied, warded against before they’d even been thought of. It all turned into a bit of a farce for him- and busy as he was, he had no way of knowing who had orchestrated it. Trapped in a room with an enraged Dumbledore, he lasted less than two minutes before having his conscious soul torn from the trembling Quirrel and trapped in a small music box, to be forever buried in some great vault. Having lost his bet over how long the fight would take, Sean grimaced and flipped Hermione a gold piece before they all made their way to their dorms and she got the first _really_ good night’s sleep she’d had in several loops. 

\----

1 week later

\----

Dumbledore’s office was a bit brighter on this particular visit, but the man himself was… “Dour” wasn’t the right word for it. His mortal enemy had been summarily dealt with just days before, after all. Perhaps “Blindsided and panicking” was a better expression for his mood, Hermione thought. It wasn’t an affect she’d seen on him very often. But they _had_ been changing things up at Hogwarts, recently. As it happened, that was what he’d called them in about.

“You two seem to have made _great_ strides in your studies,” he mused to himself, not meeting their gaze. “Yes, _great_ strides, in only a week. Too great, perhaps, for children of your age?” He turned towards her, eyebrows raised, daring her to meet his gaze and assert her honesty. She did, and felt the telltale probe of his legilimency attempting to enter her mind. She shut it down _hard_ , and suppressed a smirk when he blinked.

She held the stare for another few seconds and then took pity on him- he wasn’t _evil_ in the end, just… a bit misguided. “In a biological sense, I _am_ eleven. But you aren’t really calling us on the carpet for our _talent_ , Headmaster. Be honest.”

He shook his head, great beard making a waving motion as he did so. “No, I suppose not. You two have been… _educating,_ I suppose I should call it, the other first years. Planting ideas in their heads about the nature of magic. Dangerous ideas.”

“But not untrue ideas, or you’d have said so.” countered Sean. “Believe it or not, Headmaster, we’ve had this conversation before, in other times and places. We appreciate your methods but I don’t agree with them. The students deserve to learn what their magic is, before they destroy it. They deserve to work without blinders if they choose.” He held up the elder wand, and Hermione called out to Tesimond at the same time- Dumbledore actually took a step back in alarm, before verifying that _his_ wand and phoenix had not gone missing under mysterious circumstances. “You offered this to me once, saying I had gained the wisdom to determine what was right. I’m telling you that this _is_ right- but it won’t be easy. We need to teach them the right way, to break the traditions of ignorance.”

“It was you,” the headmaster finally realized, sitting back heavily in his chair. “You were the ones who exposed Tom, and made a bloodless fight of what _should_ have been a massacre.” He considered silently. Hermione waited calmly, as though she had all the time in the world. Once, that had actually been true. Things were a bit tighter this time around. But she’d rehearsed this bit before- she was confident in the outcome, when presented to him in this manner. He looked up and it was clear he’d come to a decision. “You would force me to make a terrible choice- to silence you, and indeed it is not clear that I _could_ \- or,” he chuckled, “to change. And let the world change with me. Well. Perhaps this old man can learn a new trick or two. But! Promise me you will not let them race beyond their ability to control their power.” Sean and Hermione promised, and agreement was reached. The first years at Hogwarts would not be subject to the wards, and they would grow in their magic as they were _supposed_ to. As partners to a loyal companion, not ignorant masters, numb to their own mutilation.

She spent the rest of the first month teaching, while flitting in and out of the Ravenclaw tower on mysterious errands- enriching herself through a muggle financial scheme she had developed years ago, acquiring powerful and mysterious artifacts she’d encountered throughout her travels, introducing herself one final time to old friends met within the loops. She and Sean held daily lessons for their first years. Indeed, some second and third years began to show up, once they saw how fast the “Firsties” were beginning to grow. The world _would_ change, in time, as Dumbledore predicted- the other schools would be forced to alter the way they taught magic, just to keep up. Wizards would grow more powerful and magic more wild. It was enough for her, for now. Whatever came when the loops finally ended, she would have the resources to deal with it.

Finally it came time for Gretchen to arrive. But they needed to set off the narrative trigger. Without Harriett’s direct narrative interference in the story, Hermione had discovered that the loop needed a slight push. Thus, on the day of, she dropped her antimemetic curse on Draco and Sean approached the young Slytherin, who had been _terribly_ confused about why everyone kept talking about their _two_ young magic instructors when he could only perceive one. “Draco.”

The blond-haired boy turned towards him in the hall between classes, looking confused. “Who are you?”

Sean sighed dramatically and put a hand to his forehead. “He doesn’t even know my name. Draco, I can’t be with you. I had to let you know. Our love is star-crossed and was never meant to be. I reject you. Oh! My heart.” Hermione crossed her arms as she watched- honestly, he overdid it _every_ time. But it was sufficient. The narrative _clunked_ like the transmission had dropped out of it and somewhere in the countryside Gretchen made her arrival. Sean turned to Hermione and they both nodded, then apparated away.

Draco, still standing in the hall, blinked a couple of times. “What?”

\----

Dealing with Gretchen wasn’t hard- what had been difficult was finding a way to re-introduce the memetic Concept without her participation so that future events could go forward- if it was simply eliminated, the loop failed to meet some end-condition and would reset immediately. The Concept had to be allowed to exist and spread, but certain safeguards could still be applied.

Sean, Hermione, and Alastor Moody arrived at the train station as the unscheduled Hogwarts Express pulled in, venting steam. When the blue-eyed girl stepped off she was summarily stunned, obliviated, and secreted away in a pocket knapsack that Hermione kept for the purpose, while Moody took a piece of her hair and transfigured himself into a perfect copy of her using polyjuice potion. He and Sean exchanged glances, and then the gruff auror, now a young girl, nodded at them. “I’ll be fine. If Dumbledore says you know what you’re doing- well, I won’t _trust_ ya, but I did my own checking. Hit me with the stuff and I’ll see you in a few days.” Hermione pulled out a portable pensieve and a _very special_ memory from her private vault, a thing she had spent many loops working to acquire. She shuddered, remembering her own time under the control of the Concept. Necessary, to grasp its function, but a nightmarish end for everyone, with the power she channeled by then- better that nobody but her would ever remember it. She emptied the glowing blue vial into the water, Moody dipped his face in, and while he was under Sean hit him with a _Confundus_. He’d come back up fully absorbed by an altered version of the meme, and believing he was Gretchen. They vanished before he was through. Things would spread as they usually did from there.

As for the girl herself- she got a very different awakening. Gentle and slow, in a bed at the sunlit and airy Hogwarts infirmary. “What? Where am I?” Hermione, Dumbledore, and Harry- who Sean had insisted be there, for the girl’s sake- were by her bedside. She latched onto the boy first, of course. “Is that- _Harry Potter?_ ” Her eyes welled up with tears. Harry, somewhat used to the attention even within his story and misunderstanding the source, tried to comfort her. “Yes, but really, whatever you’ve heard- I didn’t do it, honest, it was just an accident of magic when I beat him the first-” but Gretchen wasn’t listening. “I’m here. _I’m here_.” She saw Hermione, and some trickle of memory from the original reset came back to her. Perhaps it was something reserved for narrators, Hermione mused, even as the young girl wept openly. “You did it! You got me in. Oh, thank you.” She pulled Hermione into a great hug and held her there, while the old wizard and young man looked at each other in honest puzzlement.

Hermione’s joy was short-lived, however- in the original timeline, Gretchen had made her first assault the very night of her arrival. There was a lot of work to be done if it was going to go off non-lethally. It was important not to tip their hand in altering the meme at such an early stage, but equally important that the castle not fall beneath a tide of mind-controlled wizards.

Luckily, long experience had given Hermione a plethora of ways to re-enact the battle without casualties. When the wizards came marching up the lawn, they were met with mass sleep spells and restraining vines and perfectly-timed countermemetic charms, shutting down their advance at every turn. Sean held the front gates and defended the professors while Hermione summoned a false army of centaurs and spiders from the mud and branches of the forest- tuned to the _exact_ moment when they would have made their heroic charge, but just a little bit lighter in their blows as they rolled over the wizard flank. Grindelwald, the zombie army’s earliest and greatest defender while Moody was posing as a little girl, was summarily defeated by _two_ elder wands and a witch from his most feverish nightmares working in concert- something even he couldn’t hold out against for long.

Between the students and the staff of the castle, the tide was turned and the zombie army was on the retreat, with no casualties on either side other than those knocked unconscious, when Haley finally made her debut. The portal in the sky tore open to void rather than sunlight, but it wasn’t a colossal gold dragon rumbling through- rather, to everyone’s surprise but Hermione’s, it was a human woman, plummeting swiftly towards the ground. Sean reacted first, catching her and Matt in his magic and bringing them to a gentle landing on the grounds. But it was only his wife that he had eyes for.

He knelt beside her- she was conscious but only just. Hermione had never seen her like this, to be honest- her horns were gone, her eyes had lost their slit pupils, and her amazonian physique had disappeared. She was just a normal, human woman now. “Sean?” She asked, “I think- while I was powering the loop-”

He tried to stop her speaking. “I know, I saw. You did great, honey. But- it kind of looks like you used too much of yourself. I don’t think you’re going to be flying us into battle this time.” He tried to look away from her, to hide the anguish he was clearly feeling- she reached up and pulled his head back down.

She laughed weakly. When she spoke it was wavering, delirious. “No- I’m pretty sure I’m not even a monster anymore. I used it all up, to get us here. But I _saw things._ I think- I think that’s how I’m supposed to _work_. I build up power in a character and then I spend it. It doesn’t matter now- are you saving everyone?” She asked that last with desperate energy, looking between Sean and Hermione. Hermione wasn’t sure what she’d meant about it being how she worked, but she nodded vigorously, and Haley relaxed. “Good.” She seemed to resolve something, inside herself. “Good. Then whatever happens, it was worth it.” She lay back and fell asleep on the grass. 

Sean stayed knelt over her. He spoke so softly that Hermione wasn’t sure anyone else could even hear him. “Not to me. If it costs me you again, It’s not worth it to me.”

\----

He grabbed her later, after Matt had been dispatched on his errand with Hagrid for the second time (the first by his reckoning) and they’d taken the time to disarm the nuclear weapons that Merlin would otherwise have enchanted to use against them. She’d seen him talking to his wife in the infirmary, but hadn’t eavesdropped. Now he came for her, with an intensity like she’d never seen before. “Hermione. We have to save her.”

She looked at him in surprise. All the other times, over the hundreds and hundreds of loops, as her power had slowly declined- he’d been distraught, to be sure, but he’d never had this _fear_ before. But then- Haley had never been this powerless before, either. She tried to offer what she could. “We found potions in the past, recipes that would get her back up and fighting. We could try those now.”

He dismissed the offer with a slash of his hand, so sharp and sudden it nearly hit her. “ _No_. There’s no way in hell I’m putting her back in the line of fire. She’s _dying,_ Hermione. This is the narrative at work. It’s killing her off. She got too strong, and it turned her into a _literal engine_ to power these loops. There’s no narrative solution that’s going to save her.”

She didn’t want to be insensitive, but- “I thought you said you couldn’t die? That you’d just take a new form somewhere else?”

He snapped at her. “ _Our souls_ , Hermione. Our _souls_ can’t die. I used to think it was all narrators, now- I’m starting to think it’s just her and I. There’s some part of us that stands apart from our bodies. But our minds are still just… just _meat_. If we lose her here…” he trailed off. “I could lose everything about her that _remembers_ me. To come this far and achieve so much, to _win_ , and then lose in the _epilogue?_ ” He met her gaze and she gasped. There was _madness_ in his eyes, loss and pain and rage threatening to burn the whole world down rather than accept this outcome.

Her hand whipped out and she slapped him. Neither of them was expecting it, and it rocked him back a step. She took her own step back to try and grasp the sudden flash of anger she was feeling. As he gawped like a fish, she figured it out. “Fifty years.” He blinked in confusion, so she continued. “Fifty years I’ve spent in here. Losing, _dying_ , living and loving three months at a time, only to see it wiped away again. I was _eleven_ when I walked through that arch. My whole life, built out of shifting sands, for your _epilogue_.” She came forward, poking him in the chest, anger rising to match his. “If Haley’s body is dying, if she burned herself out, it’s in service to the cause that _she chose_. I don’t know what you’re planning but you will _not_ throw that away. Her work _or_ mine.”

He wanted to argue, that was clear, but he found no ground to do so. He was so used to flipping the script, but he _couldn’t_ , here. Events were locking. Letting the whole world go to hell just to run away wouldn’t even _work_ \- there were no other dimensions to run to, while the loops were in effect. And there were no retries. He had no place left to go. He looked the possibility of his wife’s death squarely in the face for the first time, and Hermione watched as it broke him down. “I can’t-”

She softened her approach. “You can. It’s not forever. As long as the barrier comes down, we’ll get out of here, and you can go figure out where she’s gone. You remembered once, after death- you’ll find a way to restore her. If this is all narrative, that much I can guarantee you. I can help you. I owe her that much. But we _have_ to finish what we started here. You two are the masters of these stories, not me- do _you_ think whatever story you’re on is going to end with you losing her?”

He shook his head. “I- honestly don’t know. I think we’re breaking a lot of the rules now. We’re not just _in_ the stories, we’re _dueling_ with the stories. Weaponifying their outcomes. Zombies and horror stories versus redemption arcs and hero’s journeys. And time loops. Things may get strange. I don’t think the end is written, yet. Or maybe… it will depend on my choices.” But he’d found some form of resolve, she saw. “Alright. I just- let me tell her, okay?”

He left, and Hermione let him go. When he was done, she went in to talk to the woman herself.

Haley was laid up in another bed in the hospital ward, looking like the most exhausted woman in the world. She still had energy for a smile when she saw Hermione. “Oh, hey. A personal visit from the Chosen One, just for me?”

Hermione smiled back. “If I’m chosen for this world, it’s because you two chose me. Thank you, by the way. For the chance to set it right.” She’d been meaning to say something all these years but had just… never found the right way to approach it. She’d had complex feelings about the loops, for a long time. But seeing Haley here, she realized- she wasn’t the only one paying a price.

Haley lay back against her pillow. It was strange to see her so lifeless, after all the ways Hermione had seen her live, and fight, and die. Watching her wind down over the years had been grueling, and this final outcome after all that she had seen Haley _do_ , all the victories she had achieved, but never _quite_ the right one to end the loops- Hermione could understand Sean’s rage, to an extent. Haley was staring at the sunlit window. “I just wish I was going to get to see it _all_ set right. This world, and all the rest.” She raised a hand, glanced at it. “I really liked this body.”

Hermione was still confused, but the sheer melancholy of the statement made her nervous. “You keep talking about that- but Sean’s the only one who’s changed bodies before, right?”

The other woman closed her eyes. “Yes and no. I think- he’s _seen_ more of the way the world really works than I have. I think that’s part of his… _function_ , I guess you’d call it. But after raising and spending all this power, and our talks with the Coordinator… I’m starting to remember. Things. Bits and pieces.” She opened her eyes and they were _ancient_ , like nothing she’d seen in the loops. Terrifying. Had Haley concealed this, all this time? Hermione fell down a spiraling black well and it was all she could do to hear the words Haley spoke next. “I was more than this, once. I remember that. In a way...” her eyes closed and Hermione gasped as the pressure building in her mind withdrew, feeling like she’d escaped somehow. “In a way, it feels like I’m stretching out for the first time in _ages_.”

Hermione couldn’t help but ask. “And Sean?” Despite her harsh words, she had a lot of sympathy for his terror at being left behind.

Haley smiled mysteriously, head still back against the pillow, eyes still closed. “You know I hated him, once? He’s going to be so surprised when it comes back to him. But those days are long gone. Everything we’ve shared, since then... I don’t think we’ll be apart for long.” She opened one eye and peered at Hermione. “Actually, here.” She held up a hand- in it was something tiny and glowing, indefinable- too complex to grasp with the eye. Hermione took it from her. “Tell him to give that back to me, when he finds me. I may forget a face for a time, but I can recover those memories. He’ll need something I can never forget, to hold onto.”

She tried to peer at the thing in her hand but it evaded her comprehension. It was _there,_ but not there. It had no mass but it had _weight_. In some way she couldn’t quite explain, it was the heaviest thing she’d ever held. Heavier than her _world_. It was no Pathfinder spell, she knew that much after seeing Haley’s work over the decades. “What _is_ this?”

Haley smiled, a genuine smile of ease and peace. “It’s what he means to me.” She lay back, thoroughly spent.

When the final battle came two days later, she was long gone.

\----

“This isn’t right at all,” said Holmes. He was gathered in front of Hogwarts with the entirety of the Concept. When Gretchen had come for the mirror, she had found nobody within the castle. When she had reported that the Arch was their final target, they’d made a beeline for it- and found the Ministry thoroughly deserted as well, the veiled Arch within its depths powerless and nonfunctional. Then the girl herself had disappeared, replaced by a note that simply said “Get fucked” and a picture of a madly swirling eyeball. Holmes couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

The ship was still breaching through Merlin’s portals, but it wouldn’t be long before it was on station above London, and still there had been not one hint of resistance. Hogwarts was abandoned. “Where on earth _is_ she,” he asked the small crowd, most of whom were nearly as bewildered as he was. Greg, and the Dog, and Skylar- all glowered at him, where before they’d been extremely compliant. Even Jada of the Brass City had become truculent and argumentative since their arrival here. They could sense he was losing control of the situation- his aura of infallibility was slipping. Only Merlin was still cooperating fully. Haley’s clone, his trump card, was conspicuously absent- it had faded into nothingness the moment they crossed into this dimension. Most distressing. “She should _be_ here,” Holmes lamented.

“Well, at least we agree on _one_ thing,” came a voice from in front of him. He started and turned. Haley’s husband and a young woman stood side by side, cloaks billowing around them in the Scottish highland winds that roiled the grounds of Hogwarts. The man spoke again. “Would it help soothe your ego if we said all of this has happened before and you never really stood a chance the _first_ time, either?”

Despite his grief, Sean was enjoying being the one who mysteriously appeared, for once. He’d petitioned for Men In Black sunglasses, but Hermione had shot him down on the grounds that the movie hadn’t even been released yet, in this world’s timeline. Sean continued speaking before Holmes could rally. “The rest of the castle couldn’t be here, sorry. She left a message for you, though. Just one word. _Ondansetron._ ”

Everyone stared, uncomprehending, until Hermione face palmed. “You idiot,” she cried, “that’s an anti- _emetic_ drug. For nausea, not memories!”

He shrugged, gesturing at the wave of blue-eyed zombies around them, now beginning to blink the color and consciousness back into themselves. “Well, in my defense- your rigged meme didn’t really care _what_ trigger word we used.” That was true, at least- as Merlin and Holmes spun around, the Concept unraveled. Every last one in _this_ loop had been infected with Hermione’s special version, rigged with painstaking precision to tear itself apart when the trigger was spoken. Their minds came back to them, and they _remembered_. Holmes was suddenly very much alone, in a sea of angry faces. Sean glanced at Hermione. “Do we even care if he manages to talk himself out of this?”

She shrugged. “Not really. But the other one’s going to get away.” Merlin had taken flight already, headed with undue speed away from the crowd of humans, Efreet, and infomorphs.

Sean sighed and raised his wand. “Nope. Back in your tree, asshole.” Pulled from seemingly nowhere, the ancient oak pilfered from the Ministry fired at the wizard like a guided missile. Try as he might to evade it, Merlin couldn’t dodge fast enough- not with Hermione lending her strength to its speed, and the force _inside_ it pulling it along after him. It made contact, and within seconds a spectacular detonation rocked the countryside. “Still don’t regret it, even on a second pass,” Sean muttered.

\----

They reconvened before the crowd was dispersed. Roy, Matt, Charlie, Nina, and Mac formed one exceptionally confused bloc. Greg, the Dog, Skylar, Anna and Telantes, and Haley’s mother formed another. Jada stood nearly alone, though to her surprise she found herself flanked by a copy of the ship’s avatar, _non_ -hostile this time. Sean and Hermione made up the fourth corner of the square. Holmes and Asriel were explicitly _not_ invited- the one now on the run for his life from an angry mob, the other still recuperating and (in Sean’s opinion) “Kind of a child-murdering dick anyway.” Time was tight and, once they’d been briefed on the loops, Hermione launched into her pitch for the final assault without further delay.

“It took me years to find the ritual that raises the barrier- it isn’t tied to the invasion and nobody here has any knowledge of it. I wasn’t even sure it _existed_ , at first. My breakthrough came when I first used the sabotaged meme to free the _Not Disquieting At All_ , several dozen loops ago.” She nodded at the ship’s avatar which smiled back politely, not _quite_ believing everything it was hearing- it didn’t remember the first time at all, it seemed. “It was able to search the whole planet in the few hours we have left before loop’s end. It turns out the ritual takes place on almost the antipode of London- in New Zealand.”

Greg perked up at that. “Finally comin’ full circle, then!” The others glanced at him and he tried to explain. “Well, s’where I come from innit?” He thought about that for a second. “‘Cept, on t’other planet.”

Hermione continued. “I don’t know if they picked the location because it’s as far from us as can be, or if it has some significance with the location of the battle and the Arch. I also didn’t recognize the machinery Flagg’s men were using, but the _Not Disquieting_ described it as being ‘Intensely perverse, sending ripples through higher dimensions in ways that hurt it to look at.’ It wasn’t able to give me more than that. I _doubt_ that’s all there is to it. It’s unknown if they relate to the barrier itself in some way, or if they are merely additional muscle for defense. What we _do_ know about the barrier is that people who die within it seem to be beyond resurrection, and narrative worlds _outside_ the barrier can’t seem to cross back through without holes being made for them to enter through. This is the last loop- if any of you die and we _don’t_ stop it being summoned, you will not be coming back.”

The ship’s avatar spoke up. “Ah, I do see what you’re talking about. Fascinating technology he has, and quite horrible. We’re cutting this a bit close, aren’t we?”

She shook her head ruefully. “Unfortunately they have to at least _try_ to set it up, or the loop will simply reset. It will be up to us to interrupt them. They have Concept support- the antimeme will be spreading but it would take days to reach that far. If you could begin planting the trigger word…?”

The avatar smiled and nodded. “Done. For everyone in New Zealand.” It looked startled. “Oh, the ones on the tower have already noticed. I think you should move quickly- or I could-”

She cut it off. “No, don’t do anything fancy like displace them. I tried that first, and they fought to your physical Mind and killed you. The things he has with him are _monstrous._ Only our most combat capable should come.” The group looked around, unsure who she was speaking to.

Sean stepped forward. “Jada, Roy, Matt, Nina, Mac, Charlie, and _Disquieting_ , we’d ask you to come with us, if you’re willing to put your lives on the line to end this. Everyone else, board the ship and ride this out. If we _don’t_ succeed- well, the sun isn’t going to explode this time. Have good lives here. There… could be worse worlds to live on.”

It was clear he needed to say something to the rest of them, even though they were all feeling the press for time. He stood there, lost for words for a moment, looking at the grounds of Hogwarts. “...Less than half a year here, and it feels like a lifetime.”

She reached up to touch his shoulder, but he glanced at her and she subsided. “It’s time to state the moral resolution, I guess- the thing that’s got to drive us, when we stare down the barrel of what’s coming.” He chuckled. “I hope that stating that out loud doesn’t invalidate it.” He held up the orb he’d made, and embedded Haley’s last gift within. It glowed like a miniature star, enthralling. They were all lost in it for a moment- the depths of it seemed nearly infinite. Eventually he pocketed it. “In a way, we’re ending where we began- but this time it’s her, lost out in the universe, and me tying up the loose ends. I’d call that ironic, but after everything I’ve seen… I don’t think _luck_ has anything to do with it. She was… _is_ … a beautiful soul. We didn’t disagree on much, but we disagreed on the nature of heroism. Not a subject that tends to come up a lot in most marriages, I admit.”

He turned and looked at the castle. “She hated the concept. Didn’t want to be one, didn’t want to rely on them. Thought the world needed _helpers_ , people willing to form the rungs on a ladder as it raised itself up out of darkness- not people pulling from above.” He looked at his motley crew of warriors- admittedly far more potent than they had any right to be, Hermione thought. “That’s why she made you. Spared you,” he indicated Jada, “or raised you up,” here he pointed at Matt and his squad, “or recruited you,” here he nodded to Roy. To the ship’s avatar, he said “I’m not even sure _where_ you came from, but if there isn’t a tie back to her somewhere, I’d be astonished.”

It nodded. “Her friend, Delmutt. Was going to recruit me, I think- Holmes got the Concept to me first.”

Sean acknowledged it and resumed. “The thing she never considered in her philosophy was evil. The narrative sort. Powerful beings, too powerful to oppose, doing bad things to the world not because of market forces or a lack of empathy or collective action, but because their motivations were fundamentally alien. The kinds of people who _can’t_ be opposed by sound trade policies or the end of scarcity. The kinds of people who must be _cleared away_ so that the world can get back to the business of living. She didn’t believe that these people existed. Before the barrier around our world cracked, before we were set adrift on tides of rising and falling action… she was probably right. She would say that even here, Holmes and Asriel and Merlin were simply misguided, or cowed into their behavior. But what about the being that did the misguiding, and the cowing? What we stand against has no human equivalent.”

He pointed at the assembled crew and Hermione found herself standing straighter, somehow. “She should have been here to fight alongside us but she was burnt out just giving us this chance. I think, in some sense, she got too big for the narrative we’re in. She’s still in this fight, though. You- _we-_ are her legacy. We’re the proof that the worlds can save themselves, can fight even the evils that she never anticipated. As long as we stand for her, much as she’d hate to admit it, there’s a corner of the universe where heroes _do_ matter. As long as we stand...” he trailed off, noticing that they were no longer staring at his face as he spoke, but at his _pocket_. The jewel he’d left there was glowing so brightly it shone through the cloth- Hermione thought it might have shone through six inches of _lead_ , at that point, but it wasn’t a harsh or hot light. It was a blessing. Matt, her cleric, fell to one knee. Greg took a step away from the noncombat group and towards that light, _compelled_ by it somehow. Jada hissed and squinted her eyes.

Sean smiled and wiped away a tear, trying to harden his resolve. “As long as we stand for her, she’ll be back.” He held his hand out to the group, palm down. “Hermione saved this world. Today, we break out. Today we start the war that will save all the rest.”

One by one, they placed their hands on his. When they were all together, Hermione triggered the port-key she had prepared in advance, and away they went.

\----

It was a tower, of course. They were on a building in downtown Auckland, staring up at it- Hermione thought it looked quite a bit like the pictures she’d seen of the space needle, in Seattle. It stretched above them in the gloom of night, illuminated from below and above- there were… _ships_ , vessels, circling it- things like she’d never seen before. Like great flying bricks bristling with guns. There were a huge number of figures at the base of the thing, as well- soldiers by the look of them, but there was something off about them even from this distance.

“He’ll be at the top,” she said. “The soldiers are- well, I only tried to fight them once. They can take any amount of punishment, I don’t think you can risk nonlethal measures.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” growled Jada, already unsheathing her greatsword, flames igniting along its’ length.

“We’re not fighting our way up,” said Sean. “Lightning strike to the top- the rest of you hold off those troops. _Not Disquieting_ , deal with the gunships- disable or destroy, I don’t care which. Hermione, you’re with me.” They nodded. “On my signal, displace us and take them out. Ready. Go.”

It was instantaneous. One second they were looking up, then with a flash of the inside of a mirrored bubble, they were at the top looking down. It was a small viewing platform, with room for an elevator hub and enough space for crowds to gather and view the downtown lights. The man they’d identified as Flagg was there, of course, already whirling in startlement. A squad of eight of those soldiers was with him. They were _huge_ , nine feet tall easily, covered in something that looked distinctly more advanced than the Fallout powered armor Haley had described, painted a dirty white-green, and carrying guns that looked more like rocket launchers, or cannons. For all that, there was something above and beyond their appearance that was _wrong_ about them. Their armor was corroded in strange places, and the symbols on it made Hermione’s head hurt just to look at. It wasn’t memetic- it felt like an insult to her _soul_ , in a language she’d never spoken. The man in the jean jacket had clearly not intended to get in a fight here, but he’d brought the kind of firepower that would make sure he won, if he did.

As they materialized the gunships around them blossomed into flames and two of the three went down. _Not Disquieting At All_ frowned. “The last one’s resisting somehow. I- wait, hold on, something’s happening on the upper decks.” Its eyes widened. “ _Boarders!_ ”

Sean seemed to know what they were, at least. “Space Marines. He went and brought Space Marines.” Then he got a good look at the man he’d come to kill, and stopped in his tracks. “Wait, that’s not-” That was the last thought he had time to voice before violence broke out.

Hermione, having some conception of what these things could do from past encounters, threw up two shields against the guns of the remaining gunship- one a purely magical deflection, one a solid physical barrier of stone, appearing suddenly on one side of the tower. A good thing she’d used them both, too- the rounds from the cannons on the side of the ship didn’t seem to give a _damn_ about her magic, over half of them punching right through. They tore the stone barrier to pieces, showering the group with rock splinters and shrapnel, but the brief pause was enough time for the _Not Disquieting_ to physically raise its’ hand and fire something that lit the night sky with a streak of light, reducing the ship’s cockpit to molten slag. “I’m cut off from the ship! Operating locally!” Shouted the avatar.

Matt and Roy broke right, Nina, Charlie and Mac broke left, trying to split the attention of the enemy troops who were bringing their guns to bear. They were indeed more like rocket-launchers than rifles, spitting rapid-fire explosive shells that would have torn any ordinary humans to pieces. But the whole squad had received twenty levels of Pathfinder utility, making them truly inhuman in many ways. They were able to dodge, deflect, or absorb enormous amounts of fire without breaking stride. When they _returned_ it, streaks of lightning and flashes of magical arrow lit the darkness and carved great gouges from the pauldrons and chests of the marines. Jada charged straight in with a roar, kicking the seventh marine off his feet and plunging her greatsword down towards him- he deflected with a short, humming blade that sent sparks and great slivers of metal spinning from the larger sword.

Hermione turned back from the falling wreckage of the ship to find that Sean had wasted no time, despite his apparent misgivings. The second he’d had a clear shot he’d blasted forward at the speed of thought, converting all incoming fire to tiny doves as it entered a radius around him. With a swipe of his hand he’d simply rendered the platform permeable to the one soldier who’d stood between him and the jacketed man, and despite the superhuman marine’s accelerated reaction times, he had been unable to find purchase before plummeting through the deck without so much as a scream. Sean was yelling at him over the din, but Hermione had to strain and enhance her perception with magic just to hear it. “ _Who are you_ and what the fuck do you have to do with the barrier?” Well, that settled the question about whether or not it was Randall Flagg, she supposed. His magic flexed into a spell that made the air between him and the strange man _ripple_ , and Hermione winced- she knew what he’d cast and it should have torn the man in half.

It didn’t. The man grinned and slapped the invisible force aside- it destroyed a good section of the elevator block, instead. Then he _spoke_ , for the first time that she’d heard, and the sound of it almost made her heart stop. It was like _worlds_ ending. “CERTAIN TACTICS WOULD BE INADVISABLE AT THIS JUNCTURE.” The concept of gender vanished from her mind- it was no he, it was an _it_. Whatever this was… she groaned inwardly. _Why did we think Flagg was the only man on earth who wore jean jackets?_ The thing wearing a man’s body continued. “THIS VESSEL WAS ARTHUR ANDERSON, ONCE. HE WANTED THE WORLD TO RECOGNIZE HIM. HE GOT THE CONCEPT, INSTEAD. AND NOW HE HAS _MY_ ATTENTION.” The being flicked his hands up and the night _thickened_. Everywhere the darkness of the night met them it became like- like a million tiny hands, grabbing, _clutching,_ seeking to tear and pinch and twist, slowing them down. It had no effect on the marines, now striding towards their opponents almost mechanically, laying down covering fire all the while. Matt and Roy were landing _devastating_ shots on them- magic and arrows were peeling armor and removing limbs, but the soldiers didn’t slow a whit. The thing smiled at _that_ , too. “GAUCHE, BUT HIGHLY EFFECTIVE AGAINST MAGIC USERS, EVEN IN THEIR OWN NARRATIVES.”

They weren’t just super-soldiers. Jada landed a blow that split her soldier down the middle. As the armor peeled back, Hermione saw the face- and _body-_ behind that metal shell, and gasped. They were _rotten_. Bloated, half-melted corpses, only held together by their casings. With those cracked, they spilled out- but didn’t slow. Their flesh began to form _new limbs_ , long ropey things that reached out for their opponents. Jada caught hers in a flash of her manifest fire, incinerating it. But Charlie was too slow, his swords stabbing again and again into one as it wrapped limbs around him and fell forward, engulfing him. His companions poured fire into it, but it was Hermione who got it off him- Tesimonde flew from her shoulder and exploded on the marine’s back in a ball of righteous phoenix-fire, rendering it to ash in an instant. Too late for Charlie, she saw- it had eaten half his flesh away on contact.

Sean roared and his magic _swatted_ the creature to the ground, leaving a dent in the iron plating of the platform. She guessed he’d recognized his opponent. “A _false Flagg?_ You’re fighting me with fucking _puns_ now? _She died for this!_ Spit out your ultimatum you piece of shit, I know you’ve got one- I am _done_ with this narrative and I’m done with you.” Hermione noticed the elevator ticking down, behind them. “Ship!” she called, “Down below!” It nodded and raced over the side of the platform, straight through the safety barriers. Hopefully it could intercept any reinforcements.

But the creature was enjoying winding him up far too much. “WE’RE NEVER DONE, FOOL- IT’S WHAT WE WERE _MADE_ FOR.” It scented the air, like a dog. “BUT THIS IS NOT OUR FIRST CYCLE IN THIS PLACE, IS IT? I RECALL- A SUCCESSFUL CAPTURE, YES.” Something seemed to occur to it. “A CAUSALITY HAMMER TO BREAK THE BARRIER, THEN? MASTERFULLY DONE- PERHAPS YOU WILL EVADE THIS SECOND PRISON. BUT AT WHAT COST? YOUR… _WIFE_ ,” it used the term with some hesitation… or was that distaste? “MUST BE PROUD. BUT SHE ISN’T HERE WITH YOU?” The thing smiled evilly. “PERHAPS SHE WENT AHEAD WITHOUT YOU. OR MAYBE SHE MEANT TO LEAVE YOU HERE ALL ALONG.” Sean wasn’t waiting around for him to get to the point, and attempted a coup de gras with another spell- the creature in the skin of a man juked hard to the right, and nearly fell anyway as the floor of the platform was punched away underneath him. “STILL YOU TRY TO END THIS WITH BRUTE FORCE. EVEN HALF ASLEEP AS YOU ARE, YOU MUST KNOW IT CANNOT END THAT WAY.”

One of the armored zombies had produced a _scythe_ and was locked in close combat with Matt. He, at least, seemed to have the upper hand- his hammer was glowing with unearthly white light, and his strikes seemed to be leaving lasting wounds on the undead monstrosity. Roy had been forced to fall back, wounds beginning to tell and still suffering under a hail of fire from the rapid fire bolters of two of the soldiers. Nina and Mac on the other side of the platform were being slowly overwhelmed by their remaining two opponents. Jada had moved to the elevator, covering it for now. Hermione was the only free agent, Tesimonde having not yet returned to her.

She closed her eyes and made her choice. Ignoring the shouts and screams from either side, she raced at the creature, the thing that _should_ have been a man but felt bigger than _worlds_ , aiming her magic not at _it_ but at the air around it. Vines burst into being from the aether itself, snagging him and swiftly entangling him. It produced a knife from nowhere, slinging it at her- despite all her wards it sailed right through and buried itself in her collarbone, millimeters from an artery. She cried out, clutching at it as she fell backwards. The creature was simply tearing the magical vines apart with inhuman strength. It would be out soon, but it was momentarily bogged down. It frowned in concentration. “ALWAYS THE HEROIC INJURIES. ALWAYS THE DELAYS. PREDICTABLE. ALWAYS PREDICTABLE. WHY CAN YOU NOT ACCEPT THE INEVITABLE? YOU DEFLATE THE VERY WEIGHT OF THIS ENCOUNTER WITH YOUR REFUSAL TO ACCEPT CONSEQUENCE. VERY WELL, IF YOU WISH ME TO RESTATE MY INTENT-”

Sean had one of his revolvers out. “Nope. Moment’s passed.” He fired and a great chunk of the thing’s torso disintegrated, the thunderous round blowing it into black ash. The leering creature fell to its knees, gripping the hole with one good arm. Hermione glanced up- to be honest, things could be going worse for the rest of the squad. Matt had finished his opponent and was moving to help Roy with the second one. Nina had killed one of the two on their side, but Mac was nowhere to be seen- judging by the hole in the safety rail, and the missing final soldier, he had dragged it over the side with him. Likely he’d survive that fall, if he worked through Pathfinder rules- the hundred other soldiers on the ground, though?

She shook her head. “This is all so pointless. The ritual has to be disrupted, the barrier’s done for. Can we just leave and let the loop end?”

Sean gestured in the negative- he was here for blood. But the man just wheezed- after a second, she realized he was laughing. His side was still knitting back together, like the ash was coalescing back into the shape of a man. _What_ is _he, really?_ He spoke only to Sean, refusing even to acknowledge her existence. Like he was offering commentary on a script, practically. “YOUR CHARACTERS REFLECT YOUR IGNORANCE. YOU STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THE BARRIER IS, DO YOU.”

Sean leaned in and held the pistol to his head. “Fine, we’re doing this. What is it,” he asked in a near monotone.

The creature put on a wounded face. It looked entirely unnatural, like someone who’d only ever practiced having emotions in a mirror. “DON’T YOU ENJOY OUR CONVERSATIONS?” Sean _twitched_ and Hermione could tell he was having trouble restraining himself. The thing relented. “NOT A WHAT, A WHO. YOU HAD FLAGG WARN YOU, ONCE. EVEN _YOUR_ SHODDY MEMORY SHOULD RECALL THAT CONVERSATION.” He spit to the side. “THIS VESSEL IS A BEACON. ENTROPY IS COMING. _HAS_ COME, THOUGH YOU REWRITE THE FLOW OF TIME ITSELF TO STALL IT. iT WILL SIT ASTRIDE THIS WORLD UNTIL YOUR NARRATIVE STARVES FOR LACK OF TENSION, AND THE LAST SOUL DIES. NONE OF YOUR HACKNEYED PLOTTING WILL SAVE YOU. IT WILL EAT EVERY ONE OF YOU, AND WHAT IT PASSES OUT THE OTHER END _I_ WILL MAKE USE OF. I TOLD YOU. IT’S WHAT WE WERE MADE FOR. BUT YOU SHOULD-” the inhuman thing glanced at Sean, appraising. Something clicked for it, some connection Hermione couldn’t see. Its eyes widened, and it gasped in _genuine_ shock for the first time “YOU AREN’T HALF ASLEEP AT ALL. WHAT DID YOU _DO_ TO YOURSELF?”

Sean, uncomprehending, gestured with the gun for it to continue. The creature looked like it was going to oblige, startlement lapsing into true concern for the first time, but the elevator had finally returned. It grinned instead. “TIME.” With a _ding_ the doors opened, and Jada swung her sword to cleanly decapitate anything coming through. It _clanged_ off the armor of a fifteen foot tall mechanical monstrosity.

It shouldn’t have even _fit._ The space of the elevator warped around it, as it bent first one shoulder and then the other to waddle free of the space. The metal of the platform groaned underneath it. It was like an iron pillbox with legs, and stumpy mechanical arms- but _huge_ , and corrupted by whatever awful magic had infected the other marines. One limb ended in a gun the size of a tank’s cannon, which it unloaded at Nina as it exited, blasting her backwards and into the safety railing with a hail of shells. The other arm was a hydraulic claw, and in it were the shattered remains of the ship’s avatar- having failed in its apparent mission to block the elevator. Sean hissed in despair and tried to plant a bullet in the man-shaped monstrosity before turning to the machine, but the new threat’s arrival had distracted them sufficiently that his target had already slipped its bonds and was running for the edge of the platform, _genuine_ alarm writ across its face now. The machine whipped out its arm and sent Jada spinning through the air with a blow that would have pulped a normal man.

The creature with the voice like mountains decaying might have escaped. The dreadnought might have taken all of them, everyone who was _left_ , or at least given them enough of a fight that its master could escape, could hold out long enough to complete the barrier, render them trapped with no second recourse. But a shot came in from the air, lighting the night with another streak of fire. Then another, and another. The machine sank to one knee in a _hail_ of fire, rounds punching cleanly through it and blowing great chunks of dripping, corroded internals onto the platform below. From all sides they came, railgun shots and streaks of magic fire. Rising up around the lip of the platform, the Efreets and Infomorphs who had once comprised the armies of the Concept joined the fight. Jada, gasping from the spot where she’d landed, smirked at Sean, who was gawping at the light and thunder of it. “You thought after you freed their minds and gave a heroic speech about their new god, they were just going to sit on the sidelines?”

Sean gathered himself, disappeared in a lightning-fast _Apparation_ , and caught the thing in a tackle as it was inches from the platform’s edge. “To answer your question… I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if it made me less ‘Predictable’ then I have a damn good idea _why_ I did it.” Clearly on last resorts now, the creature went for another knife. It stabbed viciously, but Sean’s body was enchanted against such things now, through long experience. The blade passed through him like water even as he bore the man to the deck. It burst into flames and Sean just held him, contemptuously. “Better wizards have tried. I get the impression you aren’t really made for close combat.”

The thing snarled at him, the whites of his eyes showing, like a horse about to bolt. “YOU- ALL OF THIS, YOU PLANNED IT SOMEHOW. YOU WIPED YOUR OWN MEMORY ENTIRELY, STARTED FROM SCRATCH. YOU CAN’T EVEN _CONCEIVE_ OF THE WAR YOU LOST. THAT’S WHY YOU EVADE MY PROJECTIONS.” But something was occurring to it. “BUT YOU DON’T REMEMBER _HOW_ YOU LOST THE FIRST TIME, EITHER. WHEN WE SPOKE BEFORE- BY PHONE, BY AETHER. I THOUGHT YOU REMEMBERED IN FRAGMENTS, THAT MORE WOULD COME IN TIME. BUT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE UNLEASHING WITH THIS WAR.”

Sean frowned, at that. Then he spoke, interrupting the tirade. “There’s a lot I need to know about the world. The _real_ world.” He looked at the thing, that Hermione guessed from past description _had_ to be the embodied Coordinator, carefully.

It mastered itself, looked back at him levelly. “YOU COULD STAY HERE. LET THE BARRIER COME DOWN ON YOU. I WILL SEND HER BACK TO YOU. YOU CAN LIVE A GOOD LIFE, A FINAL LIFE. LIVE A MILLION YEARS HERE, IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME. WE DO NOT NEED TO FIGHT AGAIN.”

Sean smiled but there was nothing friendly in his eyes. “Haley and I together, and a world of magic at our fingertips? Why would I look for a wider conflict?” Hermione’s heart caught in her throat. Was he really going to throw it away, after all? “Is probably what I’d have said, if I were the version of me from _before_.” He placed his gun back to the Coordinator’s temple. “The version of me that might have thrown away _her_ win, for _his_. The version that I’m _glad_ I don’t remember at all, anymore. Go to hell.” He pulled the trigger. Hermione looked away as quickly as she could, but there was no escaping the flash or the bang. When she glanced back, the thing was gone- just ash in the wind, underneath Sean’s hands. “I’ll figure out the rest as I go.” He looked up at her, and she tried to meet his eyes. _It had to be done_ , she told herself.

She reached out a magical hand, careful not to aggravate the injury in her shoulder, and he took it, stood up. They surveyed the carnage. The infomorph and efreet reinforcements had cleared the remaining soldiers below. Presumably the same was happening on the ship proper, though it hadn’t sent them a new avatar yet. Matt was already preparing resurrections for his fallen teammates. The world hadn’t ended, and time hadn’t yet reset. “Is it gone?” she asked him, uncertain.

He closed his eyes, staring at something she couldn’t see. “Yeah. This is Gretchen’s narrative now. Causality hammer successful, I guess. Welcome to the day after Groundhog Day.” The words were so casual, but they sucked the strength out of her. She collapsed backwards, suddenly unable to stand. _Over. It’s over_. She’d done it. The whole world, saved from death in a half dozen horrible ways, at barely any cost at all. Hogwarts free of the yoke of ignorance. The right outcome, the _good_ outcome, for everyone she’d encountered. The Perfect Run. She was crying and she didn’t know why. Sean knelt next to her, concerned. “Sorry, sorry. I know you worked hard on this, and you’re injured. Take a break. We’ll clean up tonight.” He patted her shoulder. “She… would have wanted me to say thank you. For the years you put in. For working to make this a real victory, not just a half measure.” He paused for a minute. “ _I_ want to say thank you, too.”

She peered at him. “For what?”

He smiled mournfully. “For not dying, I guess. For being a quick study and a better teacher. For not being another mistake in my pile- for resolving a couple of the others. For proving to me she was right, that it’s not just the two of us against the world. That you’ll be fine if we go fight the wider war.”

“We would be, but you won’t be leaving us,” grumbled Jada, storming up to him. The faint impression of the dreadnought’s claw was still visible on her torso, but she walked as though she was uninjured. “You think you’re going to go find her and leave me behind? She _owes_ me."

Roy walked up behind her, still clutching an injury on his right bicep. “Yeah. I need to speak to her. If something squatting around our world _ate_ my wife and daughter and that’s why we can’t bring them back-”

Matt came up beside him. “I came here with the boss, I’m not leaving without her.”

The Dog, who hadn’t even _been_ there, made an entrance from thin air with Greg and Skylar at his side, clutching his fur tightly as they materialized. “Yes, I think we’ve spent quite _enough_ time apart, these last few months. Don’t need you doing any more drugs in the _woods_ , do we?”

Hermione watched Sean, who was tearing up. “Looks like you’re stuck with us.” When he glanced at her in surprise, she smiled. “You thought you’d dump me here, narrative complete? I outgrew Hogwarts long ago. This is Gretchen’s world, now. I’m ready to see the rest of the universe.”

He sniffed a bit, and glanced out at the night sky of Auckland. “Well… shit.” He stood up from the deck, and she got up beside him. “I’m all out of inspired speeches. Alright.” He closed his eyes again. “I can feel her out there- she’s already found another world. _Oh,”_ his eyes snapped open and he looked towards Greg. “That makes sense, at least. She knew the narrator for that one.” He turned back towards the skyline of the city, humming happily. “The road goes ever on and on, indeed.”

Greg only looked puzzled, but the Dog nodded at the stout man’s side. “I did tell him, days ago, that we were going to have a Fellowship.” Hermione was sure they’d let her in on the joke, eventually.

Sean pulled the glass bauble out of his pocket and they all took a moment as they were bathed in its light once more. “Hear that, honey? They’re running scared, now. We’ll find out why and we’ll come for you _._ And it’s going to be a bad, _bad_ day for gods and monsters everywhere, when we find you.”

**END OF ARC 3**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! What a long, strange trip it's been. The story will be going on a hiatus until roughly October first, as I finish moving houses and recover my sanity a little bit. The story *will* be back, with at least one more arc before the big finish. Thank you so much for reading along on this wild journey, and I'll see you soon!


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